Hive and Nest
by BlackRose
Summary: There was a time, before the war, when "Prime" meant more than leader. In the wake of the Fallen's defeat Optimus is the last Prime remaining and his duties to his people are more important than ever. - m/m slash, mpreg
1. Chapter 1

Currently ongoing response to a TF kink meme request, which asked for an insectoid alien culture where a Prime is essentially the equivalent to an insect Queen. After the defeat of the Fallen Optimus' generative cycle comes back online; this is good for the race as a whole, but could end up causing some conflicts...

...Come on. A specific request to go wild with the alien culture? Yeah, like I'm going to pass _that_ up. ^_^

Please note: this fic will be one chapter behind the kinkmeme thread, as I'd like a chance to really comb through and edit it before posting publicly.

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><p><em>His world was reduced to this - the large, black shape of the Seeker moving over him, sharp edged wings - gloriously mature and virile - spread wide and silhouetted against an alien blue sky, and the thick, heavy swell of the spike that relentlessly filled him.<em>

_He groaned and spread himself wider, arching up into the hot rush of each thrust. The Seeker's grasp was everywhere, his back, his arms, scraping past exoplates to sink into the endomass beneath, systems interlocked and sparking. The air shattering roar of the flyer's systems was so close it could have been his own, vibrations shaking his struts and echoing deep into his protoform until he could only cry out with it, wordless vocalizations streaked with static as the growing charge arced through him. He shuttered his optics, giving himself over to the sharp, hot pleasure of it._

_Claw tips dragged and caught across his chest plates, scraping, and forced him to focus on more than just the rush of sensation. The face that met his view had shifted; silver plates, not black, and deeper, narrower optics that burned with a wild fire above the knife-edged curves of a fierce, powerful frame. The clutch of the other's hands was familiar now, the weight and shape of the body that fit against his own never forgotten. The charge between them spiraled, peaking, as his First in flight pressed sharp denta against the cables of his throat, venting hot, and the deep voice he remembered so well shuddered through his audials as the first surge of overload hit - "...scream for me, Prime."_

Optimus came out of recharge disoriented, sensor ghosts mixed with the frame deep vibration of his own overworked fans as his systems frantically dumped heat and phantom charge into empty air. Instinctive pings brought the world back into shape around him, echoing through his exterior sensors - the walls and space of the empty hangar, one of a cluster of them on base that had been set aside for their use and which he and his unit had taken to using for recharge. It was near empty, only Jolt's bright blue alt form resting near the far wall of the hangar, politely distant from the Prime's personal space.

Wincing, Optimus dialed down his sensor scans and throttled back his fans as best as he could before either could disturb the other warrior's rest. Scrambled memory file echoes, unpacked and overlaid across each other, made his endomass itch with the crawling ghosts of sensations that had nothing to do with the quiet space around him. Venting a deep air cycle, he settled back on his tires, rocking slightly, the feel of the hard cement beneath him providing a spatial check against recharge shadows.

A check of his chronometer, automatically translated against the local time units, indicated it was early morning. Three quarters of a disrupted recharge cycle, he noted wearily, and only two thirds of that useful. It was, he told himself firmly, only to be expected - it had been barely a week since Egypt and the deciding battle against the Fallen. Only a handful of days since - and he flinched from thinking it, then forced himself to do it anyways, forcing aside the strut deep tremor that came with it - his own death at Megatron's hand, and tumultuous resurrection on the field of combat by Sam Witwitcky. Memory ghosts, bleeding over from badly packed files archived in haste, was entirely in line with what was acceptable operations - not, Ratchet had been quick to note, that there was any form of operations guide for spark death and subsequent resurrection, but disrupted recharge was certainly on the mild end of the hypothesized consequences.

If nothing else, the confused overlap of ancient and new memory files, while disturbing - and somewhat embarrassing when his overclocked systems blurred the line between battle heat and shunted it through other, more private recollections - was a marked step up from straight replays of the battle. Even one cycle had been entirely too many, in Prime's opinion, to come roaring awake with the phantom pain of Megatron's blade through his spark, overlaid with the disorienting flash of life that rebooted cold systems straight through to blazing heat in the space of a click, one battle blending into another and equilibrium thrown to the void. Even worse had been the replays of his first concrete memory after waking, the sharp edged feel and bitter lightning taste of Jolt's electrowhip followed by the battering rush of intrusive systems, clawing and surging in a tangled makeshift brutality through his own, the whole of it overlaid across the haunting visual file of the elderly Seeker, Jetfire, ripping his still pulsing spark from the crumbling remnants of his own chest.

Ratchet had apologized, after the battle. It had been a combat call, necessity and the willing donation of power and parts from a mortally wounded mech. To Jetfire's honor it had, along with Samuel's sacrifice in bringing the Matrix to Optimus, been the tipping point in an otherwise desperate battle. Optimus, his sensor nets still raw and aching from the ruthless attachment of foreign parts, his whole system thrown to turmoil by the experience and still thick with the sensation scent of the elder Seeker's pathways forced through and around his own, could only agree. His gratitude was sparkfelt; the discomfort only physical, and the sensor ghosts it left behind would fade over time.

System checks brought out of recharge and finished, his HUD obligingly brought up a list of results, including a too-high core temperature that was only slowly cooling, overcharged and undergrounded systems, still fragmented partitions in his processor, and a fuel level that pinged 2.1% lower than it should, probably from inadequate recharge and his fans running hot. Optimus shunted it all aside, only to have it replaced with the local unit chronometer once more and the running list of his scheduler, his first meeting of the morning highlighted in the dutifully flashing red of his self-coded three breem warning alarm.

Optimus cycled an intake of air and calculated that he would, if he put himself in gear, have just enough time to draw a ration of energon and check with the monitor stations before his meeting - evening, East coast American time - with the Secretary of Defense. It was, his scheduler helpfully informed him, still 'Monday' where John Keller was, and human culture hastened to assure him that the entirety of the itching discomfort in his systems could probably be attributed to the same.

* * *

><p>The NEST base at Diego Garcia was still on powered down night cycle, only sentries and those who had to be awake moving about in the pre-dawn air. Optimus nodded to those he saw but kept his voice lowered, mindful of how sound carried in the quiet. He collected a cube of energon for himself, stowing it for later as he crossed to the hangar set apart from the others which housed the bristling array of monitor equipment. The lights in the temporary medbay, he noted as he passed it, were still on - Ratchet was either up early or still up late, the medic's schedule dictated by a workload that circumvented normal operations and currently including overseeing the recuperation of Arcee's units. The split-sparked femme had been airlifted back from Egypt and was still berth bound with the worst of the wounds the Autobots had taken... not that one would know it from her rigorous demands to be let out from under the CMO's watchful optics.<p>

"I'll discharge her back to light duty," Ratchet had growled when Optimus came to inquire after her, "when she can hold her own in a fragging argument." Arcee's reply had been eloquent, multisyllabic, intensely profane, mostly physically impossible, and in two part discordant harmony (her purple unit having been in medically induced recharge at the time.) It had also, apparently, _not_ been up to Ratchet's determining standards, and the femme remained in the medbay under protest.

Sideswipe was on monitor duty, the younger warrior's optics shifting only briefly to Optimus, who he greeted with an acknowledging flick of his fingers before returning his attention to the wall bank of data that was pouring in on multiple frequencies. "Aren't you supposed to be in a meeting?" he asked by way of greeting, but under the almost gruff tone of his voice the quick there-and-gone vibration of his EM field formed the sense image of a glyph that suggested the wry amusement Optimus had come to associate with the soldier.

"In a few kliks," he replied. When he opened his sensors the data signals flowed over him, humming with information that he sorted through automatically, skimming the feeds as he confirmed key points visually from the display of the monitors. "All quiet," he murmured.

Sideswipe nodded, a human gesture that had caught on quickly among them. "Wouldn't expect anything else, yet. 'Cons'll be buffing their wounds for awhile."

Prime tapped a light fingertip against a fresh weld that still showed above the other mech's shoulder join. "As will we," he noted. Technically, until Ratchet released Arcee back to duty, they were down three of an already small unit. Optimus made himself a note to check with the medic on the femme's progress, filing it in his personal to-do list. Arcee accounted for nearly 24% of his currently readily available warriors, leaving only... "Where's Ironhide?"

Sideswipe vented a sharp, amused burst from his intakes. "Training ground," he answered promptly, the accompanying sensor glyph suggesting _habitual-repeat/expected_, making Optimus nod in agreement. Of course.

"And the twins?"

The other mech's face was turned resolutely to the monitors but the bitten off scratch of static from his field, overerasing several glyphs that Optimus didn't catch, was unmistakable. "Pests are with him," was the flat answer, and Prime held back his own ventilation. Opening his personal file he made several more notes - to check with the weapon specialist about the progress of the younger twins' training, to speak with Skids and Mudflap - _again_ - about _not_ provoking Sideswipe, and a permanent subsystem notification reminding him not to refer to the two as twins in Sideswipe's presence - reminders of his own still-missing brother invariably soured the silver warrior's mood.

"Good," was all he said aloud, rigorously suppressing his own field from conveying any of the myriad of glyphs that wanted to underscore his emotional state. "That should keep all of them busy for a time." Sideswipe vented an agreement and Optimus straightened. A twinge of a warning popped up on his display as he did so, alerting him to a partial blockage on a coolant line - probably a tension twist from his fitful recharge. He filed it away with the rest of them, dismissing it, and did his best to subtly stretch to his full height, hoping to work loose the kink. "Bumblebee should be reporting in today. Let me know when he does."

Another vented affirmative, with the reflexive soldier's glyph for a command acknowledged. "Should be expecting one from the bug too?" the other mech asked disdainfully.

Optimus didn't bother to suppress a small burst of static amusement at the memory _that_ thought brought to his processor, but the vibrations in his field spoke of both humor and disappointment simultaneously, the later directed firmly at Sideswipe. "Wheelie," he said, putting emphasis on the tiny mech's designation, "will report tomorrow. I have learned it's best to leave no possibility of he and Bumblebee reporting in at the same time. It seems detrimental to the entire process."

Sideswipe ducked his head slightly in response to the unspoken chastisement. "It's certainly easier on the monitor," he agreed. "You might want to swap the pests out, though - not sure any of us can take them and Wheelie getting into it again."

Prime pulled up the duty roster, winced, and then winced again as the final timing alarm of his scheduler flashed up. "Check with Ratchet to see if any of Arcee's units are cleared for monitor duty," he instructed swiftly. "If not, then swap their monitor shift with Jolt; they'll be with you instead. Make the changes on the roster and I'll sign off on it later."

Sideswipe's field vibrated with personal dismay - chances were high that Ratchet would override any chance of Arcee's resumption of duty - but his response was suitably prompt. "Yes, Prime."

Optimus nodded and left, the insistent flashing of his chronometer prompting him to stretch his strides as he crossed to the central operations hangar, the biggest by far of the structures that had been ceded to their use.

* * *

><p>The familiar figure of Major Lennox greeted him as he entered; the human was leaning over the edge of the two-story scaffolding that ringed the central space and which housed the teleconferencing equipment, monitor banks, and makeshift work spaces for their small allies. The major was in uniform, his hair too short to be mussed, but the large steaming stainless steel mug in his hands and the yawn that punctuated his "'morning" told their own story.<p>

"I apologize for the delay," Optimus began, but Lennox waved him off, shaking his head.

"You're fine, Big Guy. Keller's aide phoned ahead, he's running late." The man twisted one wrist, peering blearily at his watch. "Probably finishing dinner," he predicted, then grinned wryly, lifting his mug in a pseudo salute. "Gives the rest of us time to finish our coffee."

"Indeed," Optimus agreed, taking his - by then - familiar place within the center of the open space, where the cameras could track him easiest. Several of the technicians, most of them toting coffee mugs at least as large as the Major's, swept in to perform the necessary equipment checks. Prime reflexively dampened several spectrums of visible wavelength in his optics as the lights flared, obligingly standing still until one of the men gave him the thumbs up which meant their calibrations were done.

"You're getting that down to a routine," Lennox noted, grinning. "They're gonna have you all trained for the talk show circuit."

"I'm sure your government would prefer I did no such thing," Optimus replied. The glyph of amusement in his field went undetected by the human, but Lennox had been associated with them long enough to recognize Prime's dry humor by vocal tone alone. "Nor can I say I am all that fond of the idea."

Lennox waved the denial away with his free hand. "Sure, that's what you _say_. The day you meet Oprah, I want pictures."

"For Sarah," Optimus countered, deadpan.

"Of course," Lennox agreed. He tipped back the last of his coffee, upending the mug. "And the rec room. That would _so_ be going up on the bulletin board." The now-empty mug earned a frown. "Hold that thought, there's just enough time to grab a refill."

There was a brewing machine set in a small nook between two of the work spaces on the upper level; the human beverage of choice required only heated water and ground, toasted beans. So much simpler, Optimus mused, than energon - though really, other than a fluid state and a preference for it just after recharge, the two substances had nothing in common as the human's drink was merely a chemical recreation, indulged for its invigorating qualities. Energon was fuel and vital sustenance all at once, as required to his own kind as water and food were to humans.

The alert about his slightly underfilled tank popped up again, insistent, at the corner of his HUD. Optimus cycled a vent through his frame, checked his chronometer, and retrieved the cube he had taken from stores. Best to take advantage of the delay while the opportunity was there.

Which meant, of course, that Lennox was returning with his own freshly refilled mug just as Prime took in the first mouthful, and the man was more than versed enough in mechanical expression to catch the grimace that the Autobot couldn't quite repress.

"Hey, you okay, Big Guy?" There was concern there, which was a warm comfort - they had come far, two disparate species with a less than optimal meeting, towards crafting a middle ground that acknowledged them all as equal individuals, foremost, above and beyond their nature. "Something go down the wrong way?"

Prime carefully suppressed the urge to spit the mouthful of energon back; it was juvenile and undignified, not to mention that the permeable seal on a cube's field wasn't designed to go that direction and he had no desire to spill a substance that was caustic to humans in a communal area. The taste washing across his sensors was both dirty and thin at the same time; low grade, barely better than raw, the kind they had all subsisted on when the situation demanded, but he had thought their newest refinery better equipped than that. Swallowing was marginally less offensive than holding it in place was and he made himself do so, though by the Major's growing look of alarm he had failed to hide the secondary face that the lingering aftertaste prompted as well.

"It's fine," he tried to assure the man, and then, because Lennox's hand was hovering near his pocket and Optimus knew full well which numbers the Major's phone held on speed dial, "it's nothing to alarm Ratchet over."

Lennox treated him to the sort of highly dubious frown which Optimus was well familiar with turning on his own soldiers. "You know, Ratchet specifically _told_ us to call him if you tried telling us that."

Of course he had. Prime shuttered his optics briefly, pressing a thumb into the small relays that surrounded them which always collected stiffness in their torque, and bit back a few choice phrases about his chief medic's heavy handed tactics. "I'm sure he did. However, truly, it is nothing." He raised the cube of energon slightly, indicating it. "One of the refinery filter arrays must be miscalibrated. I believe the nearest analogy would be your own drink, but made with half of the suggested grounds."

The Major mouthed a silent 'Oh' of understanding. "Gotcha," he said, nodding. "Dish water."

It took a bare half a second to search and find the contextual meaning behind the man's words. "More or less," Optimus agreed. He made another notation on his list to check with the engineers and find the faulty filter. A lower grade wouldn't harm any of them for a few days, but it wasn't going to make anyone's mood more agreeable either.

One of the technicians whistled sharply, the cue that the conference connection was going through. Suppressing any further expression, Optimus dampened his sensors long enough to throw back the rest of the cube, swallowing the oily taste down, and dispersed the cube's field with a disgusted flick of his fingers before dutifully straightening to face the cameras and the broad monitor displays that were flickering to life. Mondays, indeed, he thought tiredly. The human superstition might well have more than just tradition to it.


	2. Chapter 2

_I'm hoping to update this every week and a half or so - I'm not always the fastest writer, sorry! The third chapter is in the works right now, promise. ^_^_

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><p>Optimus came out of recharge the next day to the distorted phantom memory sensation of Megatron's hand <em>ripping<em> through his spark, a host of insistently flashing error warnings, the overclocked whine of his own battle charged systems, and the sound of _armageddon_ taking place outside the hangar.

Battle systems, long ago given priority over other sequences, came online in a fiery surge before his processor could even finish cycling up. Optimus was off his wheels and onto his feet before the first wash of perimeter data came back to him, his weapons powered and swords unsheathed as his sensors scrambled for a target lock. Beyond the hangar walls his Second in Command's voice was raised in sharp edged combat tones, underscored with the crash of metal on living metal, echoing through Prime's audials with the overlapped memory remnants of Megatron's snarling voice and the agonizing crack of his own shredded exoplates.

The corrugated steel of the hangar entrance had all the tensile strength of wet organic paper beneath the heat of a charged energon blade, shredding with explosive force. Cybertronian signals - _enemies_, his battle systems insisted, _targets_ - scattered before him, their cries mixed with the memory files of Decepticon voices and weapon fire. Optimus locked targeting sensors on one dodging form, transformation cogs spinning from blade to canon as the swung arc of his arm kept the target centered, and he was already seeking out the next target in the bare klik it took to power and fire.

...Except that something slammed into his arm, wrenching his aim off. The shot went wild and a deep, gruff voice pierced through the cacophony of death that was ricocheting through Prime's half-booted processor. "Optimus, NO!"

Battle systems had him twisting before he could match the voice to a designation, dropping to lower his center of gravity as sensors screamed that his attacker was shorter in height but heavy in mass. The other's grip followed him, too canny to fall for the feint, and the secondary attack came faster than he could react, pressure hooking into the joint of his knee to bring him fully down to the ground. The concrete of the base surface rose up to meet him sharply, the impact jolting through his exoplates, and that same implacable grip had his arm pulled to the near extent of the joint, wrenched up behind his chassis as a hand pinned him.

_Stupid_, his battle systems screamed at him, _careless, dangerous, Pit slagging stupid,_ a move a youngling would have been embarrassed to fall victim to and he'd stumbled right into it. He scrambled for the overrides that would shut down sensation in the pinned limb and braced himself to twist and heave; it would pull the joint loose but he could use a partial transformation to brace the limb as a secondary shield, freeing his other hand for combat...

The grip pinning him released abruptly, shifting to his shoulders in a far less effective or dangerous hold. "Optimus! Slag it, Optimus, stop!"

Ironhide, his half booted processor finally informed him. The voice was Ironhide's, the heavy weight pressing him into the ground was the weapon specialist's frame, the other mech's field searing into him with sharp, frantic pulses, full of glyphs for _stand-down_ and _false-alarm,_ underscored with the 2IC's level of authority and command imperative. As Prime he could have easily overridden the command, but as more systems booted up to help filter the input from his battle systems he realized that the echo of weapon fire was just that - sensor echoes, clogging his recharge cycle and ghosting through his sensor data.

He shuttered his optics and let himself go limp, ruthlessly deactivating the battle sequences and weapons that were clamoring for attention and let submission-to-authority flare through his field, scored through with a mortified regret that he couldn't quite swallow back. Ironhide held him for a klik more before releasing him, easing his own weight off of the Prime with caution. "You back with us now, Prime?"

Optimus had to reboot his vocalizer twice before he could reply without the words being shot through with static. "Yes. My apologies, old friend. I..."

Ironhide vented sharply, reaching down to offer a hand to Optimus as the larger mech rolled upwards. "What? Got startled out of a bad recharge by me trying to beat some sense into the slagging glitch-mice?" He jerked a thumb, indicating where Optimus could now see Mudflap and Skids hesitantly peering around the dubious cover of the adjacent hangar, and the involuntary calculation of how close he had come to offlining both twins made Optimus' systems churn. Ironhide just shook his head, a mannerism he had adopted from Lennox. "Only wonder is it hasn't happened before now. My fault, for not taking it somewhere else. Knew you were in your down cycle, should have kept it quieter."

"That's hardly an excuse," Optimus demurred. His joints felt too loose or too tight all at once, fans dumping battle driven heat, and without tactical data crowding everything else out of his HUD he could take stock of an alarming amount of error messages flashing for his attention. Venting low and long, he straightened to his feet, hastily dismissing the less critical alerts. "I could have seriously injured one of you." An understatement - his tactical log showed Mudflap squarely in his sights and at that range, without hope of evasion, a full strength shot would have left little but half melted scrap of the younger mech. Optimus suppressed a strut deep quiver, his field heavy with thick apology.

Mudflap waved it away, the irrepressible nature that both twins were known for already loosening his defensively furled exoplates. "Nah, man, didn't hurt us none, right? Shouldn't've been makin' all that noise..."

"Yeah, we sorry," Skids chimed in right behind his brother, optics glowing in the early morning light. "Ironhide's fault, right? Pitslagger was yelling, gone an' woke y'all up." Turning, he slugged his brother's shoulder none to gently. "That was slaggin' awesome, wasn't it? _Sweet_. Prime's all _boom_, outta nowhere..."

"Right through the wall, man," Mudflap agreed enthusiastically. "All blades an' shit. Hardcore, man, seriously hardcore. That's tha stuff, right there..."

Ironhide rumbled a low growl. "Isn't it about time you two glitches were someone else's problem?"

Both twins groaned. "Yeah, yeah," Skids grumbled. "S'posed ta go run around with Sides...

"He don't like us much," Mudflap interjected. "All stuck up, makin' like he's better 'n us..."

"Sideswipe is your superior officer," Optimus reminded them, suppressing a ventilation. "He is one of our best frontliners; his assignment is to assist Ironhide in your training. You should treat him with appropriate respect."

"Aw yeah, sure," Mudflap agreed, shrugging. "We got all sorta respect f'r how he slags 'Cons. Just don't like his face..."

"Ugly fragger," his twin agreed, but he trailed after when Mudflap pulled him away. "Ain't got no style. Dude, Bro', if you'd been a 'Con you'd've been _gone_. One shot, game over, that's how ya do it."

"Slaggin' harsh," Mudflap agreed, nodding. "Sides ain't got nothin' on tha Prime, no sir."

Optimus watched them go, only releasing a low ventilation when the two had ambled out of hearing. "Thank you," he murmured, aware of but too tired to suppress the glyphs of gratitude and shame that saturated his field.

Ironhide's hand brushed his shoulder, physically pressing the older mech's wash of reassurance and comfort into Optimus' sensors. "You're running hot," was all he said aloud, optics flickering in a low-level field scan, "and your systems are a mess. I'm gonna guess that was a Pit of a recharge cycle."

Optimus' hand went to his chest plates involuntarily, lingering sensor ghosts half expecting to find ragged, melted metal over a mortal wound, threaded through with a pain like no other that flickered echo alerts through his systems. "It was... unpleasant," he agreed faintly.

Ironhide's optics narrowed. Huffing a short ventilation, he stepped back, letting his hand fall. "Ain't surprised," he said gruffly, "but if you don't get some decent recharge soon, I'm gonna help Ratchet pin you down long enough to run a medical defrag. You need some downtime, Optimus. Frag, you're the slagging _Prime_, and it's barely been a week since..." He trailed off, mouth plates twisting and his field shot through with a burst of static in place of the words he couldn't make himself say. "You're entitled," he finished instead, firmly. "Think even the fragging human government could admit coming back from _that_ might need some medical leave."

Optimus flicked a glyph of negation at the other mech, pretending not to see how it made Ironhide's optics narrow even further. "We're already short three while Arcee recovers. Megatron's forces may be defeated, but they are hardly gone." He was grateful to find he could utter his former First's name without any waver, either to his vocalization or his field. Drawing in a deep ventilation, Optimus cycled his optics, deliberately banishing the last of the sensor ghosts with a short line of processor stripping quick-boot code that he had written long ago to compensate for periods of too-little recharge. "We can't afford to be lacking any more warriors, and with the human governments in an uproar over what the Fallen did I can't afford to be out of contact." _::Or seen as weak,::_ he added on a short wave com line between the two of them.

The glyphs that washed over the older mech's field were military shorthand and anything but polite. "Politics," Ironhide growled, and his tone made the word just as obscene as any other he had ever used. "Never had any use for it, never will." Venting, he reached out to give the Prime's shoulder a solid nudge. "Come on, then. Some fresh fuel might settle some of those systems."

* * *

><p>It was a perfectly reasonable suggestion, really, and something they held in common with their new allies - humans, Optimus has observed, also used fuel as a means of comfort or reassurance in times of stress, and there were specific types of food which were medically recommended to counteract certain types of physical imbalances. For a Cybertronian, a system that was running errors on too little recharge could usually benefit from a fresh influx of energon; a mech's programming would automatically prioritize fuel processing at the top of the list, allowing other systems that were caught in detrimental loops to throttle back and be shut down. That wasn't even taking into account his low fuel alert, which was flashing a sharply dropped 9.6% below standard, compared to the 2.1% of the day before. The energy efficiency for energon blades, Optimus reflected dourly, left more than a bit to be desired.<p>

He let himself settle onto the blacktop as Ironhide collected their ration cubes, gingerly working a kink from a coolant line in his shoulder that had taken the brunt of their impromptu sparring. It ached, along with a myriad of minor points through his frame, in the all too familiar and near constant feel of battered endomass underneath armor plates. The weapon specialist returned to find him patched into a phone conversation with an unnaturally awake and somewhat harried Lennox, assuring the man that the weapon discharge on base had been accidental and the structural damage superficial. Grunting, Ironhide caught the Prime's hand long enough to deposit a cube into it, and then eased down to a crouch beside him, his own cube cradled between his interlaced fingers.

It was a perfectly reasonable and medically sound suggestion but the first scent of the cube of energon, rife with traces of barely processed fossil fuels that still made up a lamentable portion of their refining process while the engineers were constructing the remaining solar collectors, made Optimus' tanks clench into a tight, disgusted knot. It was, he suspected, somewhat closer to what sewage laced water would be for a human, rather than the dishwater the Major had suggested the day before, and was in no way even slightly appealing.

He might have said as much to Ironhide - they had soldiered together through worse and Primus knew the heavily armored warrior had no reservations about commiserating if the complaints were justified - except that Jolt, who had the morning monitor shift and was collecting his own ration beforehand, settled in briefly at Ironhide's far side. The younger mech's field reached shyly out to both of them, taking advantage of the impromptu cluster to bask in a little of the interwoven sense of society that had been so easy to maintain on ship and was more difficult to explain to their human allies or find time for between patrols and duty shifts.

Optimus swallowed a ventilation. Two officers might sit and gripe about the state of affairs between themselves in private, but the last thing the younger members of his small squadron needed to see was their Prime in a sulking fit of ill humor over something as inconsequential as disrupted recharge and unappealing energon that they were all suffering through. Ironhide flickered a burst of amusement at him, as though he knew very well what Optimus was thinking, and then leaned far enough to the side to lightly bump his own shoulder plate against Jolt's, his field smoothing into the steady, deep, thrumming vibration of a warrior.

It was _soothing_. Humans, Optimus found, lived at a frantic pace, propelled by their short lifespans and the speed of their home planet's rotation cycle. It was easy to fall into - Cybertronians were nothing if not adaptable - but harder to recognize the trap of matching that pace once one had fallen into it, and harder still to power down systems back to the natural rhythm of their own long-distant home. Optimus dimmed his optics, letting the vibration of his own field underscore Ironhide's, while Jolt's lighter tone wove through them both. Like many of the younger mechs his function had been re-written, a warrior's vibration overlaid artificially across something else, but Jolt had served long and well and where his field fell into harmony with Ironhide's the doubled vibration sank deep into Optimus' circuits. _Safety_, it thrummed in the unspoken language of energy that knit them all together, _protection, perimeter, home_, and he let himself soak in it for a rare moment, soothing away a multitude of minor annoyances in the simple affirmation of their race's existence.

Their fields started to disengage when Jolt withdrew a few minutes later. Optimus brought his optics online in time to watch the younger mech down his own ration without so much as a flinch, right to the last measure, and then dismiss the cube with a flick as he stood. "Almost time for duty shift," he said as he climbed upright, but his field flickered gratitude at them and Optimus felt a pang; they were only a wartime squadron, not a real colony, but the younger mechs in particular benefitted from the steadying reaffirmation of a sense of position and place. Their limited numbers and duty shifts had them all actively working or catching recharge on the human's hectic schedule at any given time, with not enough collective downtime to properly assimilate the new arrivals and recharge their collective bonds.

He moved _re-assess duty roster_ higher on his list of things to be done, right under _consult with engineers about energon refinery error_, which was lamentably underneath an assortment of scheduled meetings with human heads of state. The cube in his hand was no more appetizing than it had been at first inhalation, and while the lesser error alerts had vanished his fuel tank was still low, his processor still thick with partition errors beneath the makeshift patch he had used, and his fans were still running to combat heat long after his battle systems had gone into standby.

Suppressing a scowl, Optimus forcibly cycled his fans down, keeping a wary bit of attention on his internal temperature. It thankfully didn't increase, though it was running several degrees hotter than normal, and he chalked the fan glitch down to systems that had been disrupted by his out-of-sequence reboot. Ironhide, who had lifted a hand in lazy dismissal at Jolt's leaving, nudged his shoulder plate. "You fall into recharge over that cube and I'm calling Ratchet," he warned, amusement flickering, and tossed back his own ration in one long swallow.

It was a challenge, Pit take it, and not one Optimus - or either of them - could refuse; not when a near youngling like Jolt could make the best of a bad situation without flickering an optic. It reflected poorly on the command structure if the officers couldn't do the same, but the satisfied ventilation Ironhide gave as he dismissed his own empty cube was just corrosion on the wound, rubbing the Prime's face in it. Sparing a half klik for silent, internal, and completely uncharitable things to think about his slagging aft of a 2IC, Optimus offlined every olfactory and intake sensor he had and downed his own cube.

It really didn't help much. The fumes lingered in his intakes and Primus, he had forgotten how disgusting unrefined fossil fuels were. His tanks flashed errors at him, half of a mind to rebel against their function, but he rigorously suppressed them. Ironhide looked entirely too pleased with himself and Optimus vented in irritation as he climbed to his feet. "Make time to get with the engineers today," he told the other mech. The humans approved of delegating at the higher levels and it would serve the slagger right to pile on a few extra hours of herding engineers around in addition to his other duties. "Check the refinement of our current process-" as though Ironhide couldn't taste the sorry state of affairs himself "-and get me a status on estimated completion of the solar arrays."

The weapon specialist signaled acknowledgement at him with a flippant flicker of his optics, heaving himself up. "Like I don't have enough other slag to do," he grumbled, but it was bluster for the sake of appearances and Optimus managed a pale flicker of humor.

"At least," he noted, "you don't have to sit through meetings with the humans."

"Too fragging right, and you wouldn't want me to," Ironhide shot back, dente bared. Giving the Prime a light push, he shot a burst of glyphs at the taller mech that were commonly used to chastise lazy sparklings. "Go on. You're late and _I'm_ the one who has to hear Lennox gripe about it later."

Optimus vented a weary whistle. "Yes, Caretaker," he agreed, earning himself a single digit gesture from his 2IC that the mech had adopted from the human soldiers. It startled a real burst of humor out of him which almost, if not entirely, made up for the lingering taste in his intakes as he made his way to the command hangar.

* * *

><p>The cavernous bay was dark, the only illumination glimmering from low strings of running lights which glowed at barely half power on generator backup. Cluttered debris cast strange shadows where the lights fell, fading into black on dark amorphous shapes that emitted neither light nor energy in visible spectrums, dead and inert.<p>

Starscream picked his way through the wreckage, fragments of the once numerous chambers that had lined the high walls crunching brittle underneath his talons. The summons hadn't surprised him, though the location had; he might have expected the command deck, or officers chambers, but not the abandoned bay which served as little better, now, than an ignominious reminder of what they had lost.

Something sharp and made of thin, metallic pieces crumbled beneath his next step. Starscream carefully did not look down.

The Lord Protector was a bright beacon in the wavelength he had tuned his optics to, the only solid point of vital energy left in the desiccated bay outside of the thin streams that traced the power conduits in the walls. He was standing near the exterior wall of the bay, where some of the darkened pods were still more or less intact, and the crimson light of his optics reflected in splintered flickers off of broken glass and crystal as he lifted his head at Starscream's approach. The damaged side of his facial plates, turned towards the Seeker, were hotter than the rest of his frame, thick with repair nanites swarming over the remnants of the Prime's handiwork on the warrior's once-fierce visage. Starscream kept his optics tuned to the energy wavelength; in the physical spectrum the seeping endomass that oozed through the ragged wound made his own plates itch in frantic memory echoes of injury pain.

"Starscream," Megatron said heavily, his vocalizer still shadowed in distortions from the damage. The Lord Protector's optics flickered away, turning to the empty remnants of their last and greatest hope. Starscream clamped his own field close to himself, not wanting to know what boiled through the other mech's energies, there, in the dark.

It was easier to keep his voice steady, stabilized in the habitual intonations of duty. "You asked for a status report, Lord Megatron." He vented shallowly, proximity sensors taking automatic stock of how much space there was between their frames, the Lord Protector's known reach and speed, and the advantages and hazards of the debris around them. "Our reserve tanks are at 19.8 percent." Megatron didn't move and Starscream eased just a little. "It won't," he added for completion's sake, "be enough to move the Nemesis."

It went without saying that it was also barely enough to keep their surviving troops online, and that not for long. It had never, Starscream reflected with a pang as he looked around the destroyed bay, been enough to hope to nurture a Prime's clutch.

_He_ had never been enough, not with a Second, not even with a Third, and the brief, momentary thrill of being a Prime's First in flight - even if in name only - had been a taste that Starscream had found soured all too quickly. The Fallen had devoured them all like refined sweets, sucked dry and discarded like so much scrap. The shattered remnants of the bay stood as a bitter testament to his failure - _inferior, too weak, pathetic_. Self-traitorous parts of his processor insisted on whispering that a clutch sparked by a proven Lord Protector might have been stronger. Might have _survived_.

Megatron clasped clawed fingers together behind his back, a low rumble whispering through the quiet. "It's over, Starscream," he rumbled.

If there were words in a list that the Seeker had never expected to hear from the Decepticon leader, that might have been very near the top of the chart. "…My Lord?"

Venting, Megatron swiveled to look at him, optics bleeding light into the darkness. "You heard me," he growled. "Look around you, Starscream. What do we have left? Damaged troops, a damaged ship, not enough fuel. No Allspark, no Prime, no clutch. No _future_. It's _over_. We're through here."

The words cut through Starscream like blades, all the worse for being the truths he hadn't wanted to admit to himself. His ventilations stuttered harshly for a moment, the flinch reflexive and impossible to suppress. "L-lord Megatron, surely…"

A swift, sharp gesture silenced him. "I'm not speaking of defeat," Megatron snarled. His sharp gaze pinned Starscream in place, the words sinking heavy in the space between them, before the larger mech continued. "There can be no defeat when there is no victory. It doesn't matter any more. It's over. For all of us."

It was eerily like the phantom sensation of claws ripping through his endomass, sinking deep and past pain into bitter cold. Starscream clamped his armor tight, needing the press and feel of it and the slow trickle of warmth his internally trapped circulations generated. That fear, of all of the things he didn't even want to think about, loosed the ingrained filter between his processor and vocalizer. "…we still have a Prime."

Since the start of the war those words had been tantamount to traitorous blasphemy in the Lord Protector's hearing, but now Megatron only tossed back his head with a short, sharp, static laugh that was utterly devoid of humor. "Oh yes," the older warrior hissed, and Starscream, who was already cringing from his own ill-advised words, flinched back further from the thick, dark, _disgust_ that saturated the other's field. "_Optimus Prime_. Tell me, Starscream, have you ever looked at him? When we meet on the field of battle, have you ever really _looked_ at him?"

Unthinkably wrong questions. No matter what the war had made of them all, there had been a time when the Prime had been _their_ Prime, and Megatron had been his First in flight, Lord Protector and sire of an entire generation of their colony. They had never, _could_ never, forget, and a warrior whose gaze lingered too long on the frame of a mated Prime was only asking to have those optics torn out. Megatron laughed again, the sound sharp edged and cruel, knowing full well what made the Seeker flinch back.

"He is a desecration to the Prime lineage," he rumbled, the words thick with an anger that made Starscream shiver. "He bears the name in blasphemy only. _Look_ at him, Starscream, the next time you face him in battle. Stripped down, armor plated, scarred as no Prime should have ever been. Dried up, desiccated, _barren_. The Fallen was ancient, but he still had more vitality than that stagnant perversion. What the Autobots call their precious _Prime_ is as sterile as any worker spark. Optimus," he spat the name through sharp, gritted dente, "is no Prime. Not any more."

Starscream shuttered his optics, shivering under the sheer force of the other mech's words and black, overwhelming field. "Then what do we do now?" he heard himself ask, his voice falling faintly into the silence.

Megatron straightened slowly, drawing himself up to the full extent of his towering height. "We are warriors," he said, the words deep and firm. "Our function was to protect, to guard, to conquer." Another bark of laughter, his gleaming optics flickering out across the empty bay. "In the old tongue, we were _drones_." The ancient word, properly underscored with the glyph of submission, was near drowned in a burst of derision. "There is no Prime any more," he spat, claws slowly curling into powerful fists at his sides. "No colony, our home world lost, no future. All of it, meaningless. Here, now, there is only what we decide. What say you, Starscream? Will you die a drone?"

He had been called many things, including coward, but insults were only in the eyes of the name-callers. Starscream straightened, exoplates scraping sharply as he firmed his stance, combat ready and solid. "If I must die," he snapped back, stung, "I will die a _Decepticon_."

Approval laced the Lord Protector's field and the burn of his optics sweeping over the Seeker only made Starscream stand taller, defiant and proud. Megatron bared his dente in a drop-jawed smile of pleasure, inclining his head to his Air Commander. "Go," he ordered. "Take the most able of our remaining warriors. We need fuel and the inner planets of this system still have resources, even if we can't claim them all."

Starscream inclined his head in acknowledgement. "And what of the Autobots?"

"It doesn't matter," Megatron rumbled darkly. "They're waiting to die, just like us. They're just too glitched in the head to know it. If they get in the way, destroy them."

Starscream vented, long and low, and in the place of the sick feeling that Megatron's earlier words had sparked within him there was a slow, growing, familiar warmth, the anticipation of flight and battle that trickled through his circuits. "As you say, my Lord," he agreed, bowing low. Megatron didn't watch as he turned to leave, but the heavy, weighted feel of the other's field lingered in Starscream's systems well after he had left the Lord Protector behind.


	3. Chapter 3

Optimus hit the ground hard, the impact jarring up through plates and circuits to vibrate into his endomass. Above him the clear blue sky spun sickeningly for a fraction of a klik before his sensors and gyroscopes stabilized, reorienting up and down in regards to his new position flat on the sands.

A dark shadow interposed itself between the sky and his optics. "Get up, you big sparkling," Ironhide rumbled. Optimus clamped his field and his armor tight to himself, offlined his vocalizer before anything could leak past it, and rolled wearily back to his feet.

Coming back to Nellis was a little like coming home - it had been their first base on the planet, the founding site of official NEST operations with their human allies. The first intake of dry Nevada heat when the carrier jet had landed had a tang of comfortable familiarity to it that the wet heat of Diego Garcia didn't yet have. The base hangars were already outfitted for human and Cybertronian interaction, without the makeshift feel of the tropical base, and the little concessions of space that they had carved out for themselves - the med bay, the hangar large enough for them all to gather in, a firing range sturdy enough to withstand Ironhide's canons and a Cybertronian sized sparring field - were all still there, only waiting for their return. Sergeant Epps had tipped his head back to the empty sky as they disembarked from the carrier, the man's voice conveying a pleasure that Optimus had silently agreed with. "Here we are again, home sweet home."

It was only temporary - there were several American heads of state, including their President, who were slated to meet with the Prime in person, and it was by far easier to make use of the State-side base than it was to fly the assorted personages out to the middle of the Indian Ocean. Optimus would have been willing to make the journey alone, but the offshoot of the Nellis base that had served them before offered space and facilities that were lacking on Diego Garcia. There were new human recruits to integrate into NEST and Lennox had suggested blocking off time outside of political meetings and making a training excursion of it. With command on both sides in agreement it was only the younger twins and Arcee's still recuperating units - only released from under Ratchet's watchful optic the day before - who stayed behind while all active warriors and NEST members had shipped back to the continent.

Optimus chided himself that he really should have known it was coming, but it had still caught him by surprise when Ironhide cornered him before the humans had even unpacked their bags. His 2IC had firmly pointed out that there was now a nearby sparring field that didn't have the added risk of open salt water ocean bare yards to either side of it, and a Prime who was, in the weapon specialist's professional opinion, badly in need of remedial training. Optimus couldn't even argue it, not when the ache of spark death still echoed through the worst phantoms of his recharge as his tactical systems tried, again and again, to locate the critical flaw that had lead to that day and that one fatal moment in the forest when he had fallen at Megatron's hand.

Which was what lead up to his current present, where his sensors had just enough time to scream the error at him a moment before the world tipped end over end again and Ironhide heaved him none-too-gently over the black mech's hip and back onto the sands.

"You," his 2IC growled, standing over him with heavy fists clenched, "are getting _sloppy_. Primus slag it to the Pit, Optimus, I _know_ I taught you better than that!"

The worst part was that he was right and they both knew it. There were, realistically, any number of mitigating circumstances, starting with his death and subsequent resurrection and compounded by his inability to obtain a full cycle of uninterrupted recharge ever since, or rebooting with anything less than a HUD full of errors. Optimus was 99.3% positive that there was a pinprick leak in one of his minor fuel lines, the kind that a mech's repair nanites would normally take care of in a few days - provided that there was proper fuel and rest involved, which had both been in short supply. It was the sort of thing a medic could spend a rotation cycle looking for and never find, and have needlessly stripped a mech of half of their plating and dug about uncomfortably in their internals in the meantime. He was fairly certain it was buried somewhere deep in his chassis, where several intermittent aches had taken up residence and the heat of his core systems evaporated off the slow drip before it ever left visible evidence.

It was one of a double handful of otherwise minor complaints that, when compounded together, left Optimus feeling sluggish and fatigued, irritable, with a tank 18.1% below standard level and entirely, as the humans would say, 'off his game'. It was all, however, irrelevant. Complaints were just excuses, and the life or death game they were all involved in left no leeway for errors. Resurrection, Optimus thought sourly, was unlikely to strike the same way twice, which meant his only recourse was to _not _make the same mistakes.

He was doing a pitifully abysmal job of it. Ironhide, optics narrowed into harsh blue slits, seemed to take it as a personal offense to his training. "Get up," he repeated for the eleventh time in twenty minutes, nudging Optimus' prone form with the flat digits of one foot. "You don't have meetings until tomorrow, and I can do this all fragging rotation if I have to. Get on your feet, soldier."

The lethargy clawing at him as he rolled heavily upright once more was utterly unacceptable. He had fought in far worse condition, they all had, on empty tanks and draining wounds, and there was no _excuse _for the slowness in his limbs and the delayed drag in his reactions. He felt like a half-clocked youngling in his first orn of combat training, clumsy and struggling, with his systems running hot from nerves.

_Dry heat_ he reminded himself, throwing open his vents as he straightened. Dry heat meant keeping vents open to circulate as much air as possible beneath heavy armor plates; wet heat meant drawing air through specific filtration vents to leech out as much of the humidity as possible before circulating it. Ratchet had been lecturing them all on that since before they had made landfall, along with reminders that the medic would have no sympathy for anyone who either overheated or drove themselves to distraction with the itching, damp feeling of condensation on all of their interior sensors - or worse, came down with some sort of organic terrestrial _growth_ fostered by the wet underneath their plates.

"If I have to decontaminate you because you can't manage your own circulation system," the medic had growled at them on the trip to Diego Garcia, "then it's going to be the worst, most invasive process of your sorry slagging lives." Sideswipe had scoffed. Optimus, who had served with Ratchet nearly since the start of the war, had not.

The wash of cool his vents drew through him seemed to help, the sensation easing one or two of the mid-level errors and making it easier to focus. Ironhide was waiting, like the grim sensor ghost of every training session Optimus had ever suffered through. Drawing a deeper ventilation, he ran a systems check of his battle systems, re-routed two processor threads (his tendency towards multi-tiered thought was, as Ironhide had pointed out more than once, a detriment to his battle reaction timing), and nodded.

It took Ironhide more than twice as much time to bring him down, but the difference between five minutes and two under actual combat conditions still equaled "dead" in most scenarios. Ironhide gave him another hand up, his field underscored with a worry that Optimus couldn't entirely discount. "I've seen you do better with broken struts and half your sensor net fragged," he growled. "Slag it, Optimus, I've seen you do better when you were _dead_ two kliks before. What's wrong?"

Optimus bit back the automatic denial. He was, by the look of his 2IC's expression, running perilously close to being marched to medbay whether he would or no and being left to Ratchet's tender mercies. The medic had been all but itching for an excuse to put the Prime on mandatory medical leave ever since his resurrection. "Timing's off," he gritted out instead. "I'm getting a lag between sensor input and reaction calculation." Which was the honest truth; shutting down extraneous processor threads had bought him a 38.26% improvement but his battle calculations were still coming through a quarter of a klik too slow to let him effectively react to Ironhide's maneuvers.

The weapon specialist rumbled thoughtfully, optics flickering in scan wavelengths as he looked Prime over. "Your sensor net is good, as far as I can tell. Your multi-tier..."

"Is off," Optimus replied hastily, and then, with a burst of sheepishness, "I turned it off for the last round."

Ironhide vented sharply, reaching up to flick a heavy finger against the taller mech's audials which Optimus didn't bother trying to duck. "Glitch. If you ever needed proof you think too slagging much..."

"I'm still getting a lag," Optimus pointed out. He cycled a deeper ventilation, twisting his neck to ease tightened cables. "...I'm not sure why."

Ironhide finally eased out of his ready stance, settling heavier onto his spread feet as he folded his arms across his chassis. Optimus suppressed a flare of amusement; he had seen William Lennox in the exact same pose countless times. "Could be a bad code compile," he suggested thoughtfully. "Something that got corrupted. You haven't had to fight since Egypt, and you were running most of that on emergency protocols. Pit knows what the Matrix did to you, or what out-of-date code-line ghosts you've got left over from that Seeker. Probably just needs a patch. You want me to take a look?"

Optimus vented softly in relief. _That _was infinitely more useful than being repeatedly thrown onto the ground; Ironhide had trained all of them at one point or another and in addition to building and tuning weapon systems the warrior had also custom built half of the battle system grafts and patches that kept them all in peak form. "Please," was all he said aloud. Ironhide huffed shortly and gave him a push out of the sparring circle. Optimus sank down at the edge of the cleared, hard packed sands, bracing his legs to stabilize himself.

"Here," Ironhide said, lowering himself to sit beside the other mech. A sharp clang sounded as he rapped one fist lightly against Optimus' hip joint. "Turn this way. I'm solid enough for both of us and I don't want your autonomics flashing gyro shifts at me every two kliks."

After some more shifting they found a good arrangement, Optimus leaning against Ironhide's shoulder, his near arm resting on the black armored warrior's upper leg. "Ready?" Ironhide asked, his field brushing the other's in a warm rush of sympathy underscored with the metal solid base of a specialist's pulse - professional competency and complete confidence, rolled through with reassurance.

In answer, Optimus twisted his wrist upwards, letting the medical port just beneath the cuff of his armor snap open with a muted click. "Whenever you are," he replied and cycled his optics off, deactivating firewalls and initiating a first level recharge power down to quiet all the systems Ironhide would need to look through.

It was an intrusive feeling, slipping in along the filaments of his neural net through pathways that were normally rigorously guarded. Ironhide's presence was a known quality, familiar as instructor and technician. The weapon specialist's electronic touch slid firmly into Optimus' systems, past conscious thought and memory, down to the levels of code that controlled life itself and rendered Optimus helpless within the prison of his own processor as his body ceded control to the other.

Ironhide's presence echoed beneath Optimus' armor and circuits, a phantom ghost of a touch deep in the struts of his endomass as the weapon specialist sent signal impulses to test reactions throughout Optimus' body. Code strings that controlled each response were scanned, the sharp, focused sensation of the other mech's processor curling around and through him. He could _feel_ the other - closer than touch, than the electric brush of a field, beyond words and glyphs and thoughts. Not as close as the searing intimacy of bared sparks but near to it and worse, not _shared_ but _controlled_. His systems, given over, could not be wrested back; his optics, offlined, could not be rebooted, and the thin veneer of stillness brought on at first level recharge barely maintained an artificial calm as the other rifled methodically through the codes that made up Optimus' every system.

A trusted party - medic or technician - could be allowed into a mech's vital systems, but the instinctive need to fight against the intrusion never really lessened. Optimus controlled it rigorously, drawing himself tight and distant within his core as Ironhide's touch stroked into deeper levels of code. The weapon specialist followed strings into subroutines and traced over the network of patches that composed Optimus' combat reactions. He couldn't flinch at the feel of code being inserted, written, erased and rearranged with a firm touch, but the instinct was there and he shuddered within his awareness of himself.

It was barely two breem by his chronometer but it felt far longer; Ironhide's touch, the flavor and feel of the other mech _changing him_, had become the entirety of his world. When Ironhide withdrew - slowly and steadily, along the same route he had intruded, giving Optimus time to lay a trace down in every system hierarchy that had been touched - it took Optimus several long nanokliks to reclaim himself.

His fans hummed with a muted whine, dumping heat that had accumulated in his core under the enforced stillness. Gyroscopes and sensors rolled sickeningly for one moment before reorienting and Optimus vented sharply, letting the shudder he hadn't been able to give shiver in a cascade through all of his joints as he reflexively tested them. They were clear, wholly his own and safe once more behind thick firewalls, but the feeling remained, like the electric tickle of an echo of Ironhide's touch.

The weapon specialist had thoughtfully flagged every subroutine he had changed, but his specialty was well earned and Optimus could only trust that the long strings of incomprehensible code tied to his combat systems were correct. He could - and had - deciphered the codes before, but it was a tedious process for him, best reserved for long periods of down time that they had only ever found onboard ship between star systems. He ran a tentative compile through the systems, reassured when nothing came back flagged in error, and unshuttered his optics.

Ironhide was peering down at him, his look unreadable. His field was furled tight and silent, another courtesy; the need for self after a hardline connection was best assuaged with privacy. It was disconcerting, however, to not know what was on the other mech's mind, particularly when his optics were half shuttered and his face plates were still and uncommunicative. "Ratchet's gone over your code since Egypt?"

"Not in-depth," Optimus replied. The medic had run standard full diagnostics and certified him ready for duty. The time that a deep level line-by-line would take had been more time than either of them had free to give over to non-critical procedures in the interim.

Ironhide rumbled softly. "Might want to," he suggested. "I patched your combat routines, but if the errors in that are anything to go by you need an overhaul."

Optimus winced, gingerly sitting up. Every motion made the echoes dimmer and strengthened his own system connections. "That bad?" he asked, rolling heavily to his feet.

"A lot of it wasn't compiling," Ironhide told him, climbing to his own feet with a grunt. "That Seeker's code was _ancient_- obsolete slag, one step up from pure binary. Not surprised it corrupted your combat codes, but you'll need Ratchet to check the rest. I wouldn't know what to look for."

"Understood," Optimus confirmed, and made a note in the upper third of his priority list. After the meetings, while the NEST training was going on, would perhaps be the best time. His HUD flickered a few errors at him - low fuel, the dull ache of his previous falls clustered in areas of compressed sensors and bruised endomass. He dismissed them out of habit, rotated the cuff of one shoulder joint to loosen the lines, and nodded at the weapons specialist. "Shall we test it?"

It was fifteen minutes later when Optimus finally hit the ground; a three fold increase over the previous test and edging firmly into "acceptable" - he could only ever count on taking Ironhide down maybe once in five attempts on a good day. The weapon specialist, for his part, seemed pleased - his optics were bright, their maneuvers had actually forced him to open up his vents, and his grip on Prime was firm as he pinned the other mech down, leveraging greater mass against Optimus' longer reach.

"Better," he huffed. "Almost normal. Any errors?"

It was in Optimus' vocalizer to respond in the negative - there were no code related errors and the previous lag was close to resolved - but Ironhide's weight was pressed into critical mobility joints, holding Prime flat to the sand and the warmth of the other's unrestrained field against his sensors brought back the echo of the weapon specialist's presence. Touch against armor plate translated to the memory impression of another in his processor, movement buried deep in his code, and for a nanoklik he couldn't move, every servo and circuit given over to the sensation.

Ironhide stilled above him, field flickering uneasy queries. "...Prime?"

Optimus' fans switched on with a rumbling roar, heaving heat and grit in equal measure where his vents were pressed to the ground. Too hot, he realized dimly, barely acknowledging the errors scrolling down his HUD. His core was heating too fast and he couldn't even _find_ the close combat routines that would have let him break Ironhide's grasp, much less execute them when his responses were fault-ridden and lagging, heavy with the sensation of loss of control. The electric tactile feel of it ghosted through his struts, sparking through circuit and mass alike.

Ironhide's optics had gone bright, cycled wide, his field peppered with something like shock. He let go of Optimus as though burned, hands spread wide, exoplates flared.

It was easier, without physical touch to reinforce memory and the heat and weight of the other across him, to wrench control back to himself and roll away. His fans were howling, the vibrations of his coolant systems shuddering through his chassis as it frantically dumped heat. Optimus braced himself on hands and knees for a long moment, optics dimmed to external input as he cut through a crazed jumble of alerts filling his HUD, filing and dismissing until he could prioritize the most critical.

"Sorry," he managed and his voice, to his own shame, was laced with threads of static. "Sorry... vent error. Overheated."

It was easier, by far, to claim that than to admit to the sudden onslaught of sensor ghosts that any half-grounded mech could have dismissed without trouble. Ironhide, when he made himself look up, was still there - reared back on his own knees, hands held away, armor flared in surprise that almost looked like submission. The weapon specialist ducked his head reflexively at Optimus' words, optics flickering. "Sorry," Optimus repeated, his voice steadier, not sure what he was even apologizing for besides the failure of his own ability.

"Alright," Ironhide rumbled quietly. There was a deep static click as the black plated warrior reset his vocalizer, optics spiraling back to something closer to normal. "Okay... good, now?"

"Yes," Optimus said. He cycled a deeper ventilation, checked his core temperature again and then throttled back his fans to a more bearable level. The electric ghost of sensation remained, sharp and prickling, but he filtered it out. "Yes, it's fine now. Just a false reading. The patch held."

Ironhide ducked his head again in an agreement that was far more passive than Prime was used to seeing from his 2IC. Optimus sat back on his pedes with a growing feeling of unease. "Ironhide...?"

The other flicked his fingers out wider, weapons powered down and cold, and his field - what Optimus could feel of it where the edges were tucked tight to Ironhide's form - pulsed with submission. Optimus' engine rumbled in concern. "What-"

The comms crackled to life a second before the base alarms began to sound. _::Incoming! We've got five hot re-entries coming down over the west coast, confirmed Decepticon IDs!::_

Optimus threw himself upright before he could even process the data burst of coordinates and trajectories, Ironhide right behind him, the warrior's dente bared and cannons surging online with crackling heat, and just like that the world fell into expected, predictable rightness again. It lent a willing readiness to the roar of his engine that had been missing before as Optimus dove forward, wheels hitting the ground in a squealing shriek as he transformed and made for the command center.


	4. Chapter 4

Thank you everyone for the comments and the plus faves and watches – even if I don't get a chance to comment back to everyone, I really appreciate it. I'm sorry for the long delay! This chapter's been rough going but it's finally done and I'm hoping to pick up the pace after this. ^_^ Also, I feel I should mention: this fic is absolutely not DotM compliant (as it takes place immediately after RotF, but I'm not even going to try to make it fit with DotM). Also, apologies for the choppiness in this chapter, and for blatantly stealing G1's plot schtick. ^_^

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><p>Airplanes were never a terribly comfortable conveyance - fragile hulks of inert, inferior metals, with none of the living spark and mind of a shuttle framed Cybertronian or even the unsparked energon systems of a crewed ship. Piloted by humans using manual controls, their tech still generations away from true interface links, they were singularly disturbing to the Cybertronians rendered effectively blind, deaf, and immobile in the cargo holds that were cavernous by human standards but barely afforded the shortest of the Autobots room to stand up.<p>

The Cybertronian reaction to planes varied from mild unease to Sideswipe's active loathing for the transport crafts which the young warrior had summed up in the local vernacular as "flying death traps". The low, unhappy growl of his engine just ahead of Optimus was a palpable counterpoint to the thrum of the plane engines through the deckplates, though Sideswipe was holding himself rigorously still. Ironhide, likewise, was hunkered down low on his axles, his own grumbling flickering in brief ghosts of glyphs through his field where the bare edge of it was pressed up against the larger Peterbilt, all of them overlapping in the close confines. Jolt, positioned at Ironhide's rear in the back of the plane, was rocking softly, minute nervous shifts of mass from one wheel to the other, kept as minimal as possible so as not to affect the balance of the aircraft.

Optimus, for himself, found it easiest to drown out his awareness of height and speed and flight systems that he couldn't control (and, as Sideswipe had gone on about at some length, the "appallingly primitive thrust technology" that was keeping them all in the air), not to mention his own soldiers' unease, by concentrating on other things. Tactics, he had found, could occupy a nicely centralized portion of his processor, and he could power down extraneous threads into something approximating a low level recharge that left him only mildly aware of the plane around him and his own inability to move within the cramped confines.

Five Decepticon IDs, dropping hot from orbit. They had guessed that the Decepticons either had a functioning ship in system or had staked a base of operations on one of the outer planets; the trajectories they had tracked from this drop only confirmed it.

Five IDs, none of them Megatron. There were too many possible conjectures to be drawn from that and Optimus wasn't sure which was even preferable to his own troops' standing. Incapacitation? Death? No - Optimus dismissed the later thought. He would, he was certain, have known if that was the case; while it held only a pale shadow of the vivid memory of his own death, he could still recall the spark deep burst of pain that Megatron's death in Mission City had caused him. He would know if the warrior were dead, and what he could recall of the battle in Egypt supported that. The blows he had struck might have put his former First down for a time, but the Lord Protector was far more difficult to kill than that.

Optimus vented softly, checking his chronometer and running calculations based on the last known intel before they had lifted off. A five unit squad, sacrificing stealth and secrecy for a fast, traceable, direct drop over the northwestern United States - the Decepticons would be on the ground well before NEST. Flawed tactics made by a rash processor, or desperation? On Megatron's orders, or a break in the Decepticon ranks? There were too many worrying options that wouldn't have an answer until they touched down.

Communications, in-flight, were reduced to satellite relay with a delay that inhibited real-time transfers. The packet, when it came through, was stamped in Ratchet's terse glyphs, abbreviated code that was a mix of military and medical shorthand encryptions. The medic, who had stayed behind to prep the medbay and relay from the monitors, kept the short burst as terse as possible. _::Hydroelectric, minimal damage, evacuation underway, standby.::_ 'Hydroelectric', an English word, was underscored with the Cybertronian glyph for the grade of energon that could be produced from the kinetic energy, clear and light and hotter burning in the systems than what could be drawn from fossil fuels. 'Standby' was underscored with the glyph for 'ally' - the local armed forces must be already on hand, assisting the evacuation of civilian workers, but the standard military had orders to fall back and contain, not engage; that was NEST's job.

The deep, rumbling growl of Prime's engine made Sideswipe rock forward sharply on his wheels, the silver warrior's field flaring query and concern. Optimus hastily throttled the sound back, dampening the itching battle-ready rev of his systems. A hot, obvious drop, minimal damage - an energon raid, and he had seen enough of them during the war to slot the rest into place easily enough, the pattern unfolding like the calculated curves of a fractal. Desperation, then, and probably Megatron's orders; their targets would be ground bound for as long as it took to fill their tanks, and Decepticon raiders had _large_ tanks.

Ironhide's field was a heavy press of rumbling heat against his rear wheels, Sideswipe a bright burst flare against his front, systems running hot and fast with anticipation that he could feel deep in his struts, mixing with his own. Optimus ground down onto his axels, letting the heat primed from sparring circulate tight and fast through his weapons systems, and ran endless calculations of airspeed versus mass and lift in the vain hope that mathematics might prove the human built aircraft could go just that little bit _faster_.

* * *

><p>Ratchet was at the comms, monitoring what they could see of the battle from satellite imagery, when the message came through. Carried on human telecommunication waves, it turned Major Lennox's sharp, breathless voice into something distant and faint - <em>::Man down! Base, we need a hot evac, plus four - I repeat, man down!::<em>

'Plus' had become the human comm chatter slang for anything mech sized, with a gradated scale applied to each of them based on height and mass which conveyed how large of a thing was needed. Which was how Ratchet knew, even before Ironhide's voice cut through Lennox's on a deep, strident note, that his worst fear was happening. Again. _::Plus seven, slag you, I can't leave him! Ratchet!::_

One of the technicians waved sharply - 'live', it meant, 'line cleared' - and Ratchet cycled a deep ventilation and reached out, pressing the tips of his fingers directly to the relay; satellite data feed was slow, but better than purely vocalized. _::Ratchet here. Status?::_

The response came back in a infuriatingly lagging flurry of glyphs and data snaps, heavy with combat indicators from Ironhide's still buzzing systems. Ratchet filtered them swiftly, discarding everything extra, and cycled another circuit of air. The NEST technician nearest him was waiting, the man's eyes wide and heart rate elevated, and Ratchet didn't bother to reassure. "Get them back here," he growled aloud, the rumble of his engine underscoring the words. "Fast as you can."

* * *

><p><em>They hit the ground hot, engines roaring. The roads between landing strip and target had already been cleared, local authorities standing clear. There was no one unauthorized to witness the top speed of a heavy semi whose engine had never been cleared as street legal in that or any other country, or of the bizarre assortment of vehicles that followed close behind in the unearthly convoy. <em>

_There was water in the air, thick and heavy with it, when they cleared the rise that lead to the dam. Water and ozone, an electric tang, and the scent sensation of raw power and half refined energon prickling at their sensors. _

_Two rotaries, three jets, large and lumbering on the ground, but it had been the proud, black glyphs of an Air Commander on upswept wings that had drawn Optimus like a magnetic pull. Ironhide had growled, the deep rumbling rev of his engine shivering through Prime's armor plates, echoed in a lighter tenor by both of the younger warriors that strained at their bumpers. Spurred on by the heated enthusiasm of his squad, Optimus' voice had sunk deep into the vibrating roar of combat, glyphs slipping quicksilver through his field in barely throttled notes of eagerness and primed systems. _

"_Autobots… __attack__!"_

* * *

><p>Ratchet was the first on the tarmac when the plane touched down at Nellis, the strident wail of his sirens cutting through even the strut vibrating roar of the jet engines before the carrier plane taxied to a stop. He had folded himself upright before the hangar bay finished opening, catching the ramp as it lowered to optic level and vaulting up into the bay, his weight making the plane shudder on its wheels.<p>

It was the glow of Ironhide's optics that met his own; the scar that left one unshielded, wider than the other, as distinctive as a spark frequency in the dimmed cargo interior. "Starscream," he said, before Ratchet could even send the query. "It was that pitslagger, Starscream. Got in a lucky shot. I've spliced Prime on my fuel line, he was draining out…"

Ratchet hushed the warrior with a sharp glyph burst, his own optics flickering through a range of scans as he knelt beside the black plated mech and the figure stretched out, limp and unmoving, on the deck. It was, he ascertained after a moment, neither worse or better than he had expected; the system shorts, some of them still sparking, that were run rampant through their Prime's internals were distinctive to one class of weapon and he could have laid that blame on the Decepticon Air commander even without Ironhide's testimony. Made to incapacitate, one shot alone wouldn't kill unless it was shoved through armor and clear into a spark core. It had, by the look of it, been exactly what Ironhide said - a lucky shot, most likely wild, and blunted by the Prime's plating.

More worrisome was the low pressure in Prime's lines and the abysmal state of his fuel tank, which pinged at over half empty and edging into the red. Ratchet cast a secondary sharp scan at Ironhide - Prime's tank was nearly twice again the volume of the warrior's - but the weapons specialist had done exactly as he should for emergency triage and the splice was a slow drip feed, enough to keep a system active but not to drain the donor.

There was, Ratchet realized as his scans came back, precise information filtering automatically through medical protocols, only a spattering of energon across the deck plates, leaked in drips and drabs from minor wounds that autonomic systems were already sealing shut. Nothing like the volume drained from Optimus' tanks, or the outpouring of a ripped main line.

Ironhide, as though he knew precisely what Ratchet was thinking - and the mech had probably been dwelling on nothing else the entire trip back to base - had an answer already queued up in his vocalizer. "Must be inside somewhere, I checked him over but I can't find the slagging leak. If that fragging 'Con got his claws hooked under a plate-"

"Yes," Ratchet said sharply, mostly to cut off the flow of amateur diagnostics. If that was the case then it was bad but not terrible by any means. Another scan, however, didn't bring up the expected dark shadow of energon pooled into endomass anywhere beneath Prime's plates, and he clicked sharply in frustration. "Here," he said aloud, reaching for the downed mech's shoulder. "Help me…"

A black hand closed sharply around his own, blocking his grasp. Ironhide, who had half reared up onto his knees at Ratchet's move, hissed a ventilation, his armor flaring with an agitated warning rattle. Ratchet froze, staring for a nanoklik. After a moment Ironhide seemed to realize what he had done and eased his grip, armor settling back down. "Sorry… still running hot…"

Ratchet narrowed his optics to hard, shielded slits. "I do _not_ have time for this," he snapped. Shaking off Ironhide's hand, he thrust a tight beam burst at the other mech, his field cutting through the other's like a scalpel. Ironhide flinched back from the heavy flood of glyphs, medical override supreme command during triage underscored with third in command authority and the whole counterpointed with the deep, ringing thrum of the medic's base vibration that demanded deference within his jurisdiction. "Throttle that slag down and help me get him to medbay, _soldier_."

Ironhide burst a short, reflexive agreement and between them they shouldered the limp weight of the Autobot leader.

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><p><em>Starscream fought nothing like Megatron, his motions the quick, erratic movements of a flier brought to ground and made awkward by close quarters. It made the long reach of his arms and sharp talons no less deadly, however, and Optimus hit hard and fast, trying to minimize the advantage that reach and mass gave to the other.<em>

_The Air Commander may have had none of the sheer headlong love of the brawl that the Lord Protector had brought to countless battles, but he fought with a sharp, vicious tenacity that kept Optimus moving and - he realized quickly, for all the good that it did - kept him away from where he might have leant a hand to the others. One of the rotary 'Cons was already in the air, escape covered by the jets that were laying into a deadly game of near and far with Jolt and Sideswipe. Optimus could hear Ironhide's deep roar somewhere to his right, counterpointed by the ring of metal on metal as the weapon specialist traded blows with the remaining rotary 'Con. The Decepticons had been refining raw energon directly into their tanks; the air was rife with the scent of the unstable conversion and neither his own mechs or the enemy had risked open weapons fire yet. Lennox and the human NEST members had been left on the ridge to await orders; body armor could protect organic flesh from many things but explosive fire and chemical burns weren't some of them._

_Starscream feinted, a darting slash and retreat, and countless vorns of combat lessons written into code and then drilled into the sense memory of endomass and struts had Optimus in motion before he had even finished tracking the move. The jet's wings made a tempting target, wide and easily grabbed, but he already knew that it left too many limbs free for retaliation and Starscream was not above raking his pede talons across armor and joints, striking out with all the strength of a lift off coiled in the impact of his kick._

_Too far, and the jet had the advantage of speed and mobility coupled with an easy out in one effortless leap into the air. Too near, and there was greater mass and razor talons to be dealt with, but close enough and the flier's width slowed his ability to dodge. Strike, feint, block; the Seeker was impossible to catch, impossible to shake._

_He was venting hot and hard when he finally took the chance and caught the edge of one wing, swinging the flier bodily around by it with a sharp, static laced cry from the Seeker. Starscream's talons were on him almost instantly, the other's armor shifting in half transformations to try to shake his grip while claws screeched across his own plates and hooked into gaps, ripping and tearing, external damage readouts flaring in bursts across Optimus' HUD. The struggle knocked them both off-balance and Optimus threw his weight to the side, dragging the other with him in a wrenching tug. Starscream's back took the brunt of the impact as they crashed into the solid concrete of a wall, his wingspan wide enough to disperse the force and dig metal edges into stone without breaking through it._

_Combat routines queued energon blades and blaster both, with angle and force required for blows that would piece armor, rip through processor, or burn through spark. Two nanokliks, his systems insisted. Two nanokliks, and he could put an end to the Seeker right then and there._

_Optimus caught one of the flier's wrists, ripping talons out of his own shoulder in a spray of sparks and fresh energon where the Seeker had hooked beneath the plates. He shut the sensors down ruthlessly, trapped wrist and wing alike against the wall, and shoved his own mass up against the Seeker to pin him there. That close, he could feel the pure, wild vibration of the other's field whipping all around him as Starscream's combat systems tried to get a lock._

"_Surrender," Optimus growled. He expected refusal, and he couldn't have said why he did it. The war had dragged on for too long, worn down mercy and compromise. Something - the Matrix, maybe, burning so close to his own spark - needed to at least make the attempt, a gesture at something, some remnant of what they had once been capable of. He ground the jet into the wall, glass and metal shrieking protest, his engine a roaring thunder in his own audials. "Surrender!"_

_He expected refusal. He didn't expect the wide flare of Starscream's optics or the sheer, raw, desperation that flared through the other's field._

* * *

><p>Ironhide was still outside medbay when Ratchet emerged, the warrior cutting off abruptly from the orders he was relaying to one of the humans when he caught sight of the medic. "Ratch'! Is he…"<p>

"He'll live," Ratchet said sharply, and then had cause to regret his choice of words at the other's startled jerk, black armor clamping down. The events surrounding Egypt were still too close to the forefront of all of their processors and it made the medic gentle his tone a little when he continued. "He's stable. He should be fine."

Ironhide relaxed a little, shoulders dropping. "Good… good. The others are on their way back, ETA in forty minutes, one hour. Jolt took a hit when the 'Cons turned tail, but he says it's nothing so serious it can't wait." The weapon specialist vented harshly, fingers curling into fists, the transformations for his cannons rippling in fits and aborted starts through his arm plates. "If I get my hands on that Pit spawned Seeker…"

The human was still waiting; Ratchet dismissed him with a wave and a nod and waited until the man had saluted and jogged away before switching to Cybertronian. "Ironhide," he said firmly, underscoring the warrior's name with the glyphs for _need-to-know_ and _medical-report_, "what the slag happened?"

The warrior cut a slice through the air with one hand, his field sharp with combat routines and too many conflicting glyphs for Ratchet to catch. "Told you," he replied in kind. "Couldn't bring out the big guns - Prime's orders and plain common sense, we'd have blown each other into scrap metal. I had my hands full with Grindor, the slagger, and Optimus barreled into Starscream like… well, you know how he does. Figured he'd be fine, the Seeker's a lightweight compared to Megatron." Frustration, guilt and fear peaked in rapid succession through the weapon specialist's field, pinging against Ratchet's in sharp spikes. "Next thing I know, I look over and Starscream's gone fragging berserk. Optimus had him good to sights and the slagger must've just panicked - fired into Prime point blank and to the Pit with common fragging sense. Took off like Unicron was chasing his contrail, screaming retreat."

The words were backed by a quick comm burst, the packet unfolding into battle analysis that confirmed what Ironhide said. Ratchet huffed, settling back onto his pedes as he reviewed it. "Starscream's shot fragged Optimus' sensor array," he sighed. "He took minor damage to his upper joints, anywhere the fragger could get a claw under his plates." Ironhide made a half startled noise, as though to protest, and Ratchet held up one hand to cut him off. "What happened before that? Your code marker was on him from earlier this rotation."

Static burst through the warrior's field for a nanoklik before he throttled it back, the sudden lack as telling as the spike had been. "Had to patch his combat systems," Ironhide said gruffly, and it might have been just another form of concern but the warrior wasn't meeting Ratchet's optics and his field was furled tight and silent. "That ancient Seeker slagged it all to the Pit; half of it wasn't compiling right and it was scrapping his response timing."

Ratchet narrowed his optics, fingers drumming a sharp rhythm against his own plates. "You flagged it all?"

Ironhide was already nodding, a weak pulse of assent underscored with indignation at the insinuation he might not have floating across his field. "Of course." He hesitated, mandible plates grinding slightly. "I had to restore some of it from the last backup of his routines that I have on file - there were some sections just _missing_. Chunks of code that weren't even _there_ any more."

Ratchet vented in a low hiss. "What else?" he demanded and, when Ironhide hesitated, he pushed with another burst of medical command underscored with an imperative.

The weapon specialist flinched, armor plates twitching. "He… it's nothing. We were sparring, I was just running him too hard. You need to take a look at his code, Ratchet, see what else is fragged up…"

"Believe me," Ratchet ground out, "I _will_. Later. What happened when you were sparring?"

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><p>Optimus came online to the unfamiliar sensation of a hard surface against his backstruts. It took him a moment to orient floor and ceiling and himself as somewhere inbetween; a berth, he realized, and that was a pleasant surprise after so many rotations spent recharging in alt form to economize on space and security.<p>

It took him longer to place the only berth he could think of as being in medbay, and at that point he belatedly identified the lag in his own processor as the remnant of cyclic medical codes on their last countdown.

"You're awake? Good."

Another moment to bring his optics online and a moment after that to bring the data into focus as Ratchet leaned over him, the medic's eyes overbright as he ran scans. "How do you feel?"

Optimus gave this some serious consideration. The medical codes pinged his HUD, signaling their end, and without their suppression a host of errors popped up. He dismissed the non-critical ones habitually, then had to pause as his tank level no longer registered as _non_-critical, the level flashing a baleful 30.3% _full_ at him.

Ratchet was still waiting, optics narrowed. Optimus hastily reset his vocalizer. "Like Starscream shot me."

The medic vented sharply. "Current temporary memory partition is fine, then. Good." He vanished from Optimus' range of vision, but the larger mech could hear him, the sound tracking to the worktable on the other side of the small medbay. "They evac-ed you back in - Ironhide had you spliced on his tank to keep you from draining out. I've got you on a drip right now, which is why your side sensors are disabled - I didn't want you ripping it out when you came online."

That data, along with others, was what Prime was studying as it scrolled in neat tiers through his HUD. The one piece he was looking for, however, was conspicuous in its absence. "Where was I hit?" His side was an obvious guess - with his sensors disabled, he could have been missing plates and mass alike and not feel it, wound gaping and already clamped off by the medic's skillfull work.

Ratchet came back into view, a cube of energon in one hand, and offered the other to help Optimus sit up, steadying him when the numbed sensors along his far side failed to compensate for the motion. His armor plates were gratifyingly intact except for the minor one removed to feed in the drip line. "Here," Ratchet said gruffly, thrusting the cube into Optimus' hands. "You'll process it better from your intakes than you will from me pouring it straight into your tanks."

They had taken the time, during the period they had been stationed at the base, to rig a small solar refinery to supplement the fossil fuels they had been dependent upon at first. The cube reflected that in the pale rose-gold coloring and the memory of the light, almost sweet taste - a thousand times removed from the contaminated energon on Diego Garcia - made Optimus eagerly lift it, spurred by the warning errors of his near-empty tank.

The cloying, raw taste, when it hit him, was so unexpected that he spat it out before he could stop himself, intakes back-cycling in a choking cough.

Ratchet rescued the cube from his grasp without comment, steadying him as he coughed. When he was finished the medic took a step back and pointedly took a mouthful from the same cube, swallowing it without a flinch. "One hundred percent solar, clear filtered," he told Optimus, setting the cube down at the end of the berth. His optics, when he looked up, were narrowed and far too sharp. "You want to tell me how long you haven't been able to drink it and why in the Pit you didn't come see me the klik it started?"

Having the undivided focus of Ratchet's - righteous - temper was a little like having artificial gravity abruptly cut out underneath one's pedes. Optimus cycled a steadying intake, rapidly resorting information and suppressed a flinch at the new picture that the reformed data created. "I thought it was a bad filter," he sighed - not a defense, no, not in retrospect, but the only excuse he could offer.

"And none of the rest of us said anything?" Ratchet snorted, the sound half ventilation, half the grind of gears. "We're not all that slagging _stoic_, you glitch." He leaned his hands on the edge of the berth, surveying his patient with a sharp optic. "I've reviewed your error log and pulled a secondary scan of your code."

Optimus pressed a hand to his side. The plates held a residual charge that sparked against his fingertips, but the internal sensors were blissfully numb. He _had_ been shot, he remembered, his hands full of frantic, defiant, enraged Seeker, but the shot hadn't pierced his armor. He wasn't, as far as he could tell, wounded in any major fashion.

Errors and codes and a fuel tank dropping into the warning zone merely from a single brief battle. Variable outcomes, none of them good, flashed through his processor. Optimus cycled another ventilation, willing himself still in the depths of mass and struts. "What is it?"

Ratchet cocked his head. "You're not dying," he said bluntly, and it took a nanoklik for Optimus to realize that the words did, in fact, release a knot of tension inside of him. "I have a question for you, though." The medic leaned forward, optics bright and intent.

"Where is your Lord Protector?"

The question was so unexpected that Optimus had no answer, vocalizer stuttering to a static laden halt. Ratchet's optics narrowed, the medic's voice dropping, his words short and sharp. "Unless Megatron's left the solar system - which I highly doubt - then you _should_ be able to track a location ping." He paused, drawing in a ventilation, and when he spoke again his voice was firm but soft, threaded through with with a deep, rich vibration that sank straight through the larger mech's struts. "So I ask again, my Prime - _where is your Lord Protector?"_


	5. Chapter 5

_Dear everyone, I am so very sorry this had taken so long! RL and a bad case of writer's block have conspired against me. The fic is not dead, however, and here's a nice long chapter to prove it. Onwards!_

A quick note about the times things take place:

Chapter One - Tuesday, Diego Garcia (Monday, Washington DC)  
>Chapter Two - Wednesday, Diego Garcia<br>Chapter Three - Sunday, Nellis NV  
>Chapter Four - Sunday afternoon, Nellis NV<br>Chapter Five - Tuesday, Nellis NV

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><p><strong>[7am Tuesday]<strong>

The Earth had an axial tilt and rotation that, combined with an organic base, gave it diverse climates and seasonal changes in many locations. It was scientific fact, confirmed by scans, which they were all aware of, but had seen very little of in practice; the areas of the planet that the human governments were willing to cede to partial Cybertronian occupation were universally _hot._It bothered them very little; a mech's systems could easily take heat or cold to greater extremes than organics could with no more difficulty than minor adjustments to their core system temperatures, but it was a hardship to their human allies and was reflected in the flushed and sweating faces of the NEST team members who were gathered on the tarmac in full gear under the rapid growing heat of the Nevada sun. Ratchet had been keeping one optic on them, particularly the new recruits, with a low level scan keeping him aware of their core heat and fluid levels compared to the absurdly fragile levels that comprised dangerous thresh-holds for humans.

The entirety of the rest of his attention was given over not to the training exercises that were being laid out, but to the officers doing them.

Optimus was as an imposing figure on the training ground as he was on the battlefield, tall and striking beneath the mid morning sun. It endlessly impressed the NEST recruits, the soldiers turning towards him like solar receptors to a light source.

To Ratchet's critical optic, he looked better than he had two days before, but it would have taken a far less attentive medic than Ratchet for it to have been otherwise. After the day of the raid a night of uninterrupted medic-induced recharge coupled with hours of a gradual direct-to-tank fuel feed had put the large mech back on his pedes. If not quite back into fighting trim he was at least substantively improved from before and had stood through the required meetings of the next day with something approaching his usual aplomb. Ratchet himself had skipped recharge entirely the first night and only caught a fractional cycle the night after but it was far from the first time a patient's care had been the priority over his own upkeep and it wouldn't be the last. His systems were built to be able to run on minimal defrag, never mind skipping the partial cycles that compromised their current planetary night rotation.

No, Ratchet was far more concerned with watching Optimus - or in watching those around him.

Two nights of forced recharge and fueling - the second only because Ratchet had argued that combat exercises were more strenuous than diplomatic talks and had then pulled medical rank and threatened to ground their leader for the duration of the exercises if he didn't comply - had put the Prime on his pedes but hadn't done a slagging thing otherwise. Ratchet, with his sensors flung wide and ramped high, was hyper aware of not only their organic allies but of their own troops and the dips and flares in the systems of each. Optimus, though he was walking the length of the line on the tarmac with the outward appearance of his usual ease, had pulled his field so tightly into himself that it barely skimmed the surface of his armor, the big mech passing between his troops with an unnatural 'silence' that barely skimmed their sensors. Medical scans tracked blooms of flaring heat that was painfully slow to disperse in the big mech's frame, swirling in gradual drifts along primary system lines, and Ratchet ground his dente together, clicking softly to himself in the depths of his vocalizer.

The effect on the line was nearly as bad; Jolt had nearly flinched when the Prime passed too near him, armor tightening, only to quickly pull himself to attention again with a sheepish shake. Sideswipe _had_flinched, half a step back, plates rippling, and Ratchet had broken the line to gruffly shove his own bulk in front of the young frontliner. Sideswipe had hissed protest, glyphs snarling, and Ratchet had brought the weight of his pede down on the other's wheel rim until Sideswipe had winced and given way with something that might almost have passed for respect for a senior officer. If one were half blind and squinting, but from Sideswipe it could pass.

Even the organic members of NEST could feel it, sensorless as they were. Prime's steady pace hid an underlying charge that the officers next to him had picked up on; Ratchet watched as Lennox shifted restlessly from foot to foot with uncharacteristic impatience, Epps' voice ringing louder and more stridently in the desert air than audible projection required.

Ratchet straightened just enough to glance over the head of an unconsciously hunched Jolt. On the younger mech's other side - as far from where he _should_have been as possible, their entire rank and ordering mixed around and neither of the younger mechs daring to say a word about it - Ironhide was standing with a rigid attention pose borrowed from their human allies that was as foreign to him as respectful salutes would have been on Sideswipe.

The pitslagging coward wouldn't even _look_at him, not even when Ratchet jabbed him, hard, with a ripping line-of-sight comm circuit. Jolt ducked down further, the flicker of half-hearted protest glyphs skating barely formed across his pulse. Ironhide, slag him to the Pits, never so much as cycled an optic, or took said optics off of a vague distant point on the horizon. His field was a muddy mess of barely restrained vibration and impenetrable layers of half formed glyphs that went nowhere and meant nothing, a white noise static of temper and frustration that Jolt had been steadily edging away from, one tiny weight shift at a time, until the younger mech was practically inside Ratchet's own field.

Ratchet kept his growl deep in his engine, nearly sub-audible, and settled deeper onto his pedes as Lennox took over for Epps, the NEST commander laying out the details of the training scenario. The medic spooled that information into a temporary cache, his focus more on his own data feeds than the human's voice.

* * *

><p><strong>[36 hours earlier - 7pm Sunday]<strong>

"So I ask again, my Prime - _where is your Lord Protector?_"

Optimus had to reboot his vocalizer to clear the static, not once but twice, the telltale click of it too loud in the quiet of the medbay. Ratchet never moved, optics bright and steady, nothing but autonomic systems in motion as he waited. "That is hardly rele..."

The flat of the medic's hand met the edge of the berth with a sharp, vibrating clang that touched off reflexive responses which Optimus grimly throttled back, unwilling to give the other the satisfaction of a flinch. Ratchet's optics were steady, bright pinpoints of unwavering focus, his uninhibited base field - and it was _that_ which made Optimus' ventilations catch, not the surprise of motion or sound - rolling over the Prime with a thick wave of demand. "Wrong," he said, and the firm but cool tone was worse than all of the snarling and swearing that usually kept their frontline troops subdued. "It is _very_relevant. Once more, my Prime - where is your Lord Protector?"

The glyphs underneath the words, flooding through his field, tore into Optimus like shrapnel. Unmuddied, sharp and clear and _old_, the oldest meaning of _Prime_, underscored with Ratchet's base function and the subservience and authority duality that went with it. 'Lord Protector' was threaded through not with his former First's designation but with the root glyphs of drone and mate and guard and sire, chain woven into a single whole that was half of the Prime, the two spun into each other to form a single overarching glyph that Optimus could feel the shape and desperate vibration of deep in his innermost mass.

His vents were wide open, sucking air through his internals in erratic flows as his plates shifted, flaring and tightening. He couldn't feel the berth beneath his grasping hands, could only cling to the edges of it by shape and visual confirmation. Another reboot, vocalizer clicking harshly, and the voice he could force from it equally embedded in gravel. "Megatron..."

Ratchet reached up, fingertips hooking into the flanges at the crux of Optimus' mandible, just strongly enough to force the larger mech to meet his optics with a little shake. "No," he said. "Unless you can honestly tell me that you know precisely where Megatron is, right this very moment, then that is _not_what I asked. Can you?"

The last was said almost curiously, as though Ratchet were posing a minor question about some triviality. Optimus swallowed the heavy, foul taste of fossil fuels, watched his tank gauge drop another .01 percent despite whatever was in the line hooked into his side, and shuttered his optics. "...No, but..."

Ratchet clicked softly deep in his thorax. "You haven't been able to since Mission City, I imagine. Hardly surprising..."

"Enough," Optimus growled. "What you're implying..."

The medic cut him off, exventing, derision streaking his field in a handful of irritated glyphs that felt much more like his usual tenor. "Are you seeing anything else, here? Because I'm not."

* * *

><p><strong>[3pm Sunday]<strong>

â€œWhat happened when you were sparring?"

â€œNothing," Ironhide had replied, far too sharply for what should have been a routine report, specialist authorized work relayed to medical. Ratchet narrowed the focus of his optics as the weapon specialist looked away. "Like I said - code degradation from that obsolete seeker. Optimus was running hot, overworking to compensate for errors, thatâ€™s all..."

â€œ_Ironhide_." Ratchet let the tone of his interruption alone carry the unspoken threat, rumbled on the growl of his engine.

The black plated warrior jerked as though struck, his optics flickering. "He said it was a false reading, just an error, something in his vent system. Couldâ€™ve been, I was running him hot, trying to get him up to speed-"

Ratchet clicked sharply and Ironhide twitched, hands coming up, palms open and spread wide as the heavier mech ducked his head, taking half a step back. Ratchet stilled himself, venting heavily, and forced himself to wait.

"Donâ€™t," Ironhide said at last, raggedly, optics still trained on the ground, his own pedes, the other side of the base - anywhere but at Ratchet. "Pit, medic, back off. I canâ€™t... He was running _hot_, alright? I canâ€™t fragging say it, Primus, there was a time Iâ€™d have been scrap metal just for _thinking_ it, _He_wouldâ€™ve ripped out my optics just for looking..."

It took a fraction of a klik for the meaning to come through, the word â€™hotâ€™ so habitually underscored for battle readiness that it took Ratchet a moment to parse that it wasnâ€™t underscored _at all_, the meaning left open in the lack of a clarifier, and the last pronoun overlaid with rank glyphs so long unused that he barely recognized the warriorâ€™s cant. It all came together in a cascade tree of rapidly ticked off points, the whole pinging, sharp and hard, off of protocols so old they were near archived. Packed under vorns of medical code and function threading, it was overwritten easily and quickly, shunting it harmlessly away.

Harmless, except for the sudden unfurling complication of what had been a fairly routine patch and weld job, Ratchet thought in dismay. And Ironhide, like most base coded warriors, had no such buffering layer to fall back on. "Single threaded glitch," Ratchet grumbled, and when the warrior snapped up in surprise he put a hand against his chest plates and shoved, knocking the other mech back a step."Straighten up, _weapon specialist_."

The underscore of specialty, overlaid with the crispest military glyphs of _respect-for-superior-rank_that Ratchet could form, jolted Ironhide into doing exactly that, his field unfurling in a static rush."Ratchâ€™..."

"It might just be those old codes from Jetfire. It might be nothing," Ratchet said, but he couldn't put solid belief-in-truth into his field and Ironhide's dimmed optics said the warrior knew why.

* * *

><p><strong>[7am Tuesday]<strong>

The day's exercises laid out, the men broke ranks, peeling off into squads. The Cybertronians mostly stayed still - the newer of the human soldiers didn't yet have the knack of knowing when and where a pede would come down, compensating for a size differential that put their smaller and infinitely more fragile allies at risk. There hadn't ever been an accident, not yet, but there had been a few close calls that had done more damage to Cybertronian dignity and inanimate property than anything else. It certainly didn't hurt to give their human companions time to adjust.

So Ratchet, Jolt, and a fidgeting Sideswipe stayed still as the men dispersed around their knees. Ironhide, however, broke away to help Lennox chivvy up the new group of soldiers that the human head of NEST had taken on for the day's exercises. Ratchet, optics narrowed, watched him go. The large black mech made a beeline across the tarmac for his human partner, all unstoppable force and solid strength, but to anyone who knew what to look for it was there.

It showed in the way he pulled up at the opposite side of the group Lennox was barking orders at, instead of circling to Lennox's side. It effectively put the humans between the weapons specialist and the Prime, who was bent down to discuss last minute details with Lennox. It showed in the way Ironhide's optics flickered, there and back, and the minute flare and flex of his dorsal plates. Ratchet, cycling through scanning wavelengths, bit back a low, aggravated sound at the pattern and rhythm of the heavy warrior's internals.

Optimus, finished with Lennox, straightened with more haste than was his usual want and stepped back. Ironhide shifted his weight, very nearly stepping forward, but caught himself.

On Ratchet's other side, Sideswipe _jerked_, an involuntary movement that shuddered through his plates. The medic planted a pede solidly on the younger mech's wheel stop, this time bearing down with the entirety of his reinforced mass until the warrior was flinching back _from him_and not from anything going on across the tarmac. "Slaggit, you old fragger, watch what you're doing!" Sideswipe hissed, field lashing angry and affronted and confused all at once.

Ratchet leveled a flat, unwavering stare at him. "You have your orders," he barked, underscoring the words with his own rank and a sharp, clipped reprimand. Sideswipe grudgingly ducked, plates half heartedly lifting a fraction, seething with sullen temper. Ratchet ignored it and gave him a shove against one wheel. "Go on."

On his other side Jolt was still right where he had stood all morning, the blue mech's armor flared outwards in silent supplication, optics darting nervously between the rest of them. Ratchet kept his glyphs gentler, pressing apology and reassurance into the younger mech's shoulder plate with a brief touch. "You too," he instructed, and Jolt ducked his head, flashed a glyph of acknowledgement, and went to collect his own team of humans.

Ratchet, according to the recorded directives, was to ride back up and support and preferably keep any of their allies from keeling over in the Nevada mid-day sun from their own enthusiasm. Ratchet filed that away as a secondary concern and, plotting the multiple trajectories of organic movement across the tarmac, stalked after Ironhide.

* * *

><p><strong>[34 hours earlier - 9pm Sunday]<strong>

The crack of Ironhide's fist against the dirt was muffled into a loud, indistinct thud, like the human's construction machinery impacting earth. The black plated warrior pulled his fist back, sandy dirt streaming from his finger joints, and slammed it back into the same cratered hole once more. "Scrap," he rumbled, and what his vocalization lacked his glyphs made up for, an ugly dark tangle of blasphemies rolling off his field. His optics, when he raised them to Ratchet, where bright blazes of blue in the darkness. "You are fragging _kidding_me."

"Believe me," Ratchet had replied heavily, twisting to loosen a tightened linkage in his lines, "I wish I was."

Optimus had been, mercifully, deep in medically induced recharge, every dent and scratch from that afternoon's battle patched, and an energon line fed directly into his tanks. Ratchet had put the scans on automatic, linked the feed directly to his own processor, and was watching the slow fill of the Prime's tanks with a grim optic. Done with everything that could easily be rectified, he had left the larger mech in the quiet of the medbay and ventured out to find the other piece to his dilemma.

_That_ had gone about as well as he had expected, which was to say _not at all._

Ironhide leaned heavily on his knuckles for a long moment, his glare all but demanding Ratchet retract the words. When the medic didn't he finally vented, a slow expulsion from the depths of his systems, and pushed himself heavily back upright to his pedes. "How long?" he asked gruffly.

"Mission City would be my best guess," Ratchet answered promptly. He didn't say any more; didn't need to, the events of that battle seared into the long term banks of every mech who had been there to witness it. Ironhide shifted uneasily, hands curling and uncurling at his side.

"That long?" he asked, surprise blurring the edges of his glyphs. "The code breaks - those were new..."

"New Jersey," Ratchet supplied, watching the other mech flinch at the sound of the human municipal designation. "And Egypt. The symptoms started then."

Ironhide had mastered himself with difficulty, the rough feel of it shuddering through the heavier mech. "'Symptoms'?" he asked, voice crackling at the edges. "That what you're calling it, then?"

"I call it," Ratchet had snapped back, sharp and aggravated, "a Prime _without_a Lord Protector."

That had earned him the full weight of the weapon specialist's glare and the black, blistering rage was back, flaring through Ironhide's field in jagged spikes of threat and warning. "_No_," he snarled and one quick step had him in Ratchet's proximity, close but not quite touching, leaning in to where the full wash of his fury surged over the medic's sensors and almost forced him back. "Slaggit, medic, I will _not_ stand silent if Prime goes back to him. I won't. I _can't_." Deep in his resonance, beneath the anger, was a grim undercurrent; challenge and sure deactivation, and Ironhide's implacable steadfastness to see both through if necessary.

Ratchet dared to raise a hand between them, dermal sensors brushing just microns above the larger mech's chest plating. "You won't have to," he said softly, the pronoun underscored with an older form of warrior - _protector-guardian-submission_ - wreathed in glyphs for absence and need that wove together as a whole to paint the glyph for possibility. _Candidate,_ it said. _Protector-elect._

Ironhide jerked back as though shot, optics spiraling wide, field blaring an inarticulate burst of static. Ratchet let him go, waiting. It took several deep vent cycles and the audible reboot of systems before the black mech found his voice again, gruff and edged in roughness. "You're kidding, right?"

Ratchet sank back on his pedes, arms folded across his chassis. "Already told you I wasn't," he said. "I haven't changed my mind in the last klik."

It was the weapon specialist who dropped his gaze first, plates unconsciously tightening. "Primus."

The vibrations in his own field were old and rusty with disuse, ancient and archived, but the feel of them was as familiar as his own spark. Ratchet half dimmed his optics and threw open his vents, _feeling_ the resonance sink into his struts for the first time in countless vorns. "And from Primus the Primes, and from the Primes, embodiment of Primus' gift, _life._" His voice wavered on the last word, too long unsaid, the multi-tonal layered glyph that, at it's oldest root meaning, stood for their very race.

Ironhide's unvocalized flicker of respect and response was just as old, a reflexive acknowledgement even as he was physically shaking his head in a gesture they had all picked up from the humans. "I can't," he said, the protest underscored with pleading, as though he might, by tone alone, force Ratchet to see reason. "I _can't_. Pit, I'm not even ranking..."

"You're our second in command," Ratchet pointed out ruthlessly. "I fail to see it getting much higher than that."

"You slagging know what I mean," Ironhide growled back, the expansive gesture of one hand taking in his own frame with a dismissive flick.

"You're also a warrior," Ratchet continued relentlessly. "How many of those do we have, exactly?" He waited a beat for that to sink in, waited until the other mech dropped his gaze once more. "Precisely. So, unless you're willing to throw this open to the 'Cons..."

"No!" It came out snarled on the bass crescendo of Ironhide's engine, the sound growling through the still night air. "Never!"

"Then I suggest," Ratchet snapped back, unflinching from the other's anger, "you get over your Pit slagging traditions and _step up._."

There was silence between them for several long minutes, broken only by the slowing rhythm of Ironhide's ventilations and the steady tic of Ratchet's. Finally the black plated warrior looked away, rubbing a hand over his helm, fingertips sliding with a dull scrape over his faceplates. "Don't mean to buck medical authority," he rumbled quietly - an outright falsehood so blatant that Ratchet could only bite back a burst of laughing static - "but in case you didn't notice, I'm a grounder."

Ratchet's hand came up at an oblique angle from the warrior's anterior sensors, faster than he could duck. The resulting clang rang dully in the quiet. "In case _you_didn't notice," he pointed out acidly, "so is Prime. This isn't a virgin flight."

Huffing a low, irritated vent, Ironhide sidled a step back on pretext of resettling his weight, putting an arm's length between them. "Then what am I supposed to do, Ratch'? Walk up and proposition him?"

"You could," Ratchet replied blandly, mostly just to see the other mech give a startled jerk, field flaring a jumbled mix of overlapping glyphs that came through as a burst of static. Ratchet suppressed his own amusement. "It's not like you have any real competition; Sideswipe's too young." He tilted his head and let his optics dim, feigning thought. "Or you _could_ use both of your primary modes of transport. I'm sure a good, long, no holds barred drive would serve to get his engine revving hot just as well as a flight would. The key components are that you _chase_ him and _catch_him, not what venue you do it on." He inclined his head slightly. "There is precedent, you know. Megatron is hardly the first Lord Protector to die before his Prime."

Ironhide's field flickered _disbelief-amazement-consternation-inadequacy_ underscored, sharply, with heavy glyphs for incredulous longing that bled at the edges into shadowy half formed sigils of desire. Ratchet reached out and patted him, much gentler, on the shoulder. "That's what I thought," he said, satisfied.

* * *

><p><strong>[7am Tuesday]<strong>

The slagging Chaos spawn wasn't looking at or acknowledging him in any way, Ironhide's optics flickering right past Ratchet as though the medic were invisible. The humans were mobilizing quickly, clustering with their assigned Cybertronians; Jolts' group, who had drawn the swift strike role, were already circling the mech like an over excited group of sparklings on light armored terrain vehicles. The Prime, who had taken the role of adversary for his own group (with a sparkling-like enthusiasm that the humans never noticed, hidden in pleased harmonics of glyphs beneath the perfectly measured tones of his vocalizer) was crouched down at a distance with his assigned squad clustered close around him, probably devising last minute surprises for the rest of them. The base betting pool was split between Optimus, with Graham, or Lennox and Ironhide's team for last-one-standing, while Sideswipe and Epps held favorite odds for highest kill count.

Ironhide, who was standing uncharacteristically motionless and quiet while Lennox finished briefing their group on tactics, a large black wall behind his favored human partner whose attention, Ratchet would be willing to bet every last chit he ever hoped to own, was on anything _but_ the training exercises. Just because his primary optics were fixed on the humans around his pedes didn't mean his sensor suite was and Ratchet watched the other mech's internal systems flux, matching the spikes on his scan with every time he could visibly see Optimus so much as _twitch_.

Primus. It was like waiting for a red giant on the verge of fusion collapse - you knew it was coming, but it might be in two kliks or it might be a few hundred vorn and the unaided optic wasn't much going to help you determine which.

Ratchet didn't _have_ a few hundred vorn to wait for the weapon specialist's processor to sort itself out. Their Prime didn't have a few hundred vorn - scrap, he didn't have a few hundred _days_. None of them did, not with the 'Cons hovering just out of atmo, where neither they nor the humans could take the fight to them.

The medic had run the variables of another encounter like Mission City or Egypt too many times in the last two days, and none of the projections had been either reassuring or favorable. He hadn't been able to linger on them; the idea alone pumped nitrogen through his lines and poured acid into his tanks. They couldn't risk it. Not again. Not _now_.

Time was a luxury they didn't have.

Lennox was barking last minute orders, his team dispersing in orderly fashion to collect their gear. Ratchet diverted his own steps across the tarmac, cutting across and over the heads of several of the men, who ducked and slid out of his way. Ironhide was trailing after Lennox, his systems fluxing as he brought his weapons online in a systematic check. The black mech's optics landed briefly on Ratchet as they passed each other, then just as quickly slid away.

Ratchet exvented hard, brought his own weapons up in a cascade of flickering system response checks, and sidestepped, deliberately, to crash his shoulder against the weapon specialist's. "Hurry up," he snapped in English, then, in sharper Cybertronian, "or I _will_."

The warrior's cant glyphs - _urgency-imperative-need_, overscored with _certainty_ and underscored with _possession_ - made alien feeling shapes in Ratchet's protocols, but they did what he intended. Ironhide pulled up sharply, rocking back on his heel spurs, and the sudden whip crack of the other mech's field - _disbelief-falsehood-fury_crackled almost painfully against his own in a harsh demand for retraction. Ratchet met the other's optics unflinchingly, engine growling an insubordinate refusal.

Ironhide hissed, his own engine growling back on a deeper note. "You wouldn't..."

In answer, Ratchet threw his weight against their clenched shoulders, reinforced medical hydraulics putting enough force into the gesture to drive the warrior back half a step. Turning sharply, he marched across the tarmac towards Optimus. His spark was spinning furiously, combat systems whining into life, his dorsal plates nearly twitching with protocol needs that screamed never to turn his back on a potential conflict. He could _feel_Ironhide's optics on him in a near palpable way, itching across sensor suites.

The first heavy footstep behind him _did_make him flinch, but whatever half formed expectation he had never materialized. Ironhide stalked right past Ratchet, ground eating steps bringing him abreast and past in a crackling charge that washed over the medic's sensors, a crashing wave that all but physically pushed him aside.

Ratchet slowed his steps to let the other take the lead, but didn't stop. It put him a perfect mech length behind the other when Ironhide strode up to the team clustered around Optimus, the humans scattering before the black mech like glitchmice.

The Prime, optics flickering uncertainly between his two senior most officers, rose slowly to his feet as they approached. "Ironhide," he said, the English sounds underscored with Cybertronian query. "Ratchet. Is there a problem?"

Ironhide didn't stop, taking the last step into the heart of the Prime's field, his own flaring almost visibly bright, engine rumbling deep and low as he slapped the palm of one hand directly onto the broad chest plates of his commanding officer. "_Drive_," he growled, and the sound-glyph, in Cybertronian, was challenge and victory all at once.

Ratchet was close enough to see Optimus' optics flash near white in surprise, and to hear the almost hiccuped stutter of the larger mech's systems. The tarmac around them had, he realized distantly, gone strangely quiet as optics - mech and human alike - turned towards the scene. Optimus knew it too, optics flickering away and back, and to Ratchet's trained scans there was nothing calm about him, no matter how rigorously he controlled the smooth tones of his modulated voice. "I do not know what you..."

"Start. _Driving_," Ironhide snarled, bodily shoving the larger mech back a step. Optimus half stumbled, then took another step, and another. Ironhide echoed each, stalking forward, field anticipatory and tense. "You've got two breems advance once we're off base. Go."

Optimus looked past Ironhide to Ratchet, possibly hoping to find some glimmer of reliable intervention there or a speck of support. Ratchet cut off his own ventilations, wrenching protocols from one track to another in mid-stream with a suddenness that put a pained undertone note to his field as he opened it up, harmonic vibrations countless vorn unused filtering up through strut and mass to ring from every plate.

It wasn't the answer Optimus had wanted and it drove him back another step, one that Ironhide closed with a swift, decisive motion. "_Drive_," the weapon specialist repeated, the word painted in glyphs of challenge and command. "_NOW._"

They hung there, poised in a tableau, the push and pull of fields between them hanging static and thick in the air. One nanoklik. Another. Another, and then Prime _broke_, something indescribable surging through his field and up, into his optics, in the split moment before he turned, took two long, stumbling steps back from the black mech confronting him... and threw himself into his alt, transformation sequence still clicking into place as his wheels hit the tarmac and peeled out with a shriek of rubber on asphalt, tearing away for the base exit. Ironhide took four steps, running, and dove onto his own wheels, engine a howling roar as he raced after.

Every optic, every organic eye, and ringing dead silence. "Stay here!" Ratchet roared, underscored with the sharpest and heaviest glyphs of authority and third in command that he could form, and then, belatedly, repeated it in English. "Stay here, I'll take care of it!"

His spark was spinning, hot and fast, whole systems vibrating with the shudder of it. _Now_. Throwing himself onto his wheels, Ratchet switched on the wailing cry of his sirens and sped after the other two.

* * *

><p>Lennox realized his mouth was hanging open, slack jawed and nothing short of stupid looking, but he was at a loss as to what to do about it. Raising his hands didn't help; it only put the fabric of his cap within reach, the hapless material twisting in his grasp as he dug his fingertips into his scalp. "What. The. <em>Fuck?<em>"

No one answered. Epps, he was dimly pleased to see, look just as gobsmacked as he felt. Snatching his cap off, Lennox scrubbed a hand through the sweat soaked stubble of his hair and then down, over his face. "No," he demanded. "No, _really._What the FUCK?"

Still no answer. Pulling his gaze away from the open mouths and deer-in-headlights looks of his men, Lennox tipped his head back to turn his glare on the two remaining Cybertronians in their midst. Jolt ducked his head away, blurting something that sounded like a cross between an old dial-up modem and a kid's tricycle bell. Sideswipe met his glare head on, so it was the silver frontliner that Lennox focused on. "Well?"

Sideswipe shifted his own glare to his fellow Autobot, snarling the unfortunate union between a sink garbage disposal and a junk compactor swallowing a grand piano. Jolt shifted uneasily, snapping something back that was part fax line on speaker phone and entirely alien.

_Their_'bots - an unfair distinction, but it was how Lennox privately thought of the ones who had been there the longest, the ones who he and the founding members of NEST had fought with and sometimes died for and had the closest knit ties to - were usually careful, or at least unfailingly polite, about keeping to human languages in the presence of their allies. He wasn't sure if they spoke their own language amongst themselves - he assumed that they, like most ESL speakers, did - but they didn't subject human ears to it.

The newer crowd that had landed since Mission City either didn't have the same unfailing manners that Prime's original team did - excluding Bumblebee who had a legitimate excuse and _still_managed to use sound bytes from pop culture media more than he spoke Cybertronian - or else they just hadn't gotten that memo and didn't care. Lennox had found himself grudgingly fascinated even while his ears were ringing - they all sounded distinctly separate even in alien machine noises, and it sometimes had nothing to do with their adopted human voices that NEST was familiar with. He was willing to bet that Sideswipe, who had a middle to low voice when speaking English, was actually the Cybertronian equivalent of a light tenor, and he was still trying to think of a way to ask if the frontliner's heavier use of what registered to human ears as musical notes - however heavy rock and machine garbled - was some sort of a dialect or accent.

Epps had a lot less patience for it but he'd had to deal a lot more with the Tweedle Twins, as they'd been dubbed, and Lennox considered that fair cause. "No, no, don't give me none of that alien shit - what the motherlovin' _fuck_was that all about?"

Another spatter of Cybertronian, hiss-click-beep-modem, but Jolt's hands had come up into it now and Lennox didn't need words when he could read the body language well enough - angry, a frustrated slash through the air and a jab at Sideswipe, which the silver mech returned with interest. He'd seen the same dance between his nephew and niece enough time to recognize it, even pantomimed on eighteen foot tall alien robots - _You tell dad! No, YOU tell him!_ Drawing a deep breath, Lennox pushed it into a drill sergeant roar. "Will you two _shut the fuck up_and SOMEBODY tell me what the hell just happened!"

Jolt spat another modem-carwreck mashup hybrid at Sideswipe and resolutely turned away, walking off. The gesture he flung back was one the 'bots had learned from the NEST soldiers, and unmistakable no matter how many digits they actually had on each hand. Sideswipe barked something after him, half an orchestra falling down nine flights of stairs while someone ripped apart a train in the background, but when Lennox focused angrily on him the silver mech's snarl faded somewhat. He chuffed, clearing his vents, wheels shuffling uneasily back and forth. "...Don't know," he finally admitted.

"You don't _know_," Lennox repeated, deadpan. It got him another, more muted spat of Cybertronian, probably concerning his mother and his personal sexual habits. _Your mother was a toaster!_a singularly unhelpful part of his mind supplied but long habit kept any kind of humor out of his face.

"You heard me," Sideswipe snarled. "You ask me, they're glitched. Ironhide's been off his code all morning, itching for a fight, and Ratchet's just as bad." He shrugged, another borrowed human gesture, sharp and insolent. "You heard him. Whatever it is, he'll take care of it." The silver mech hissed out through his vents, the sound managing to convey a scoffing huff. "He tells me to stay, in _that_ tone, I'm staying. _You_can do as you like. Have fun explaining it when they get back." And with that, the mech spun in an easy twirl on inlined wheels, skating away.

Epps, when Lennox glanced his way, was rubbing a rueful hand over the smooth curve of his skull. "What'd ya think? Bad news?"

"Bad news, good new, no news," Lennox shot back. "_Alien_news. If their own don't know them I'm fresh out of ideas." He sighed. "Hope to fuck it's not some glitch in the Big Guy."

The other man snorted. "You ever known Big Budda to run from anything?" He shook his head sharply. "No, scratch that. If Ratchet was tellin' _me_to suck it up and take it like a mech, don't worry, this ain't gonna hurt and it's for my own good... I'd be running too."

"Damn straight," Lennox muttered. "Alright, we interrogate 'em when they get back. Meanwhile, round the men up, we've still got a full day and the schedule's gone to hell in a handbasket..."


End file.
